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I wore this on Friday, March 13th.

I went out to Oakland with my wife for a belated birthday celebration for her friend, so I wanted to be put-together. The weather called for a solid top layer, but nothing too heavy. We were planning to do karaoke too, which meant any jacket I wore would inevitably be coming off as soon as I cued up Madonna’s “Beautiful Stranger,” my go-to song.

I faced a specific set of circumstances, in other words, which called for a specific piece of clothing. Fortunately, I could turn to my jacket rotation.

At this point in my life, putting on clothes is one of the most enjoyable parts of my day. It’s a respite, an utterly low-stakes ritual that allows me to devote time and energy to something that makes me happy. In a world engineered to produce outrage and anxiety and bleak resignation, that’s not nothing. Some people pull espresso shots or solve crossword puzzles; I get dressed.

Think of it like a little brain teaser, even an algebra problem.

(4x + 7) ÷ 3 = 5

You’ve got a couple known factors: time, location, occasion. Those are your constants. Maybe you’ve got a coefficient too, a multiplier that needs to be taken into account—the weather, for instance. And then you’ve got the variable, your clothes. That’s all it really comes down to: solve for x.

Still, things can get tricky. Unless you’re wearing overalls or a jumpsuit (which I’ve been known to do), an ensemble isn’t composed of just one value. Pants, shirts, shoes, hats—all these pieces have values of their own. They interact with each other, and they must be taken into account accordingly. They are complexifiers, and they make the equation more difficult to solve. Usually, your algebra problem ends up looking something like this:

((4x + 7) - y(6 + (2z))) ÷ 3 = 5

In such cases, it helps to have known quantities, predictable values that help eliminate guesswork or uncertainty. The more constants you have, the easier the problem is to solve. Which brings me back to the jacket rotation.

These days, my wardrobe is coherent enough that I have a good idea of the colors and textures I’m most likely to wear any given day: blue shirts (whether denim, chambray, or oxford cloth), brown pants (whether khakis, cords, or carpenters), black or brown shoes (whether leather or synthetic). I also have a general sense of the shapes of these items and the way they fit on my body—shirts are typically loose and boxy, pants are high on the waist and wide through the thigh. I know what I look like, basically.

What this all means is that certain jackets are likely to complement most of my looks. They are constants, rather than variables, and they make the algebra equation simpler. These are the pieces in my jacket rotation.

The jacket I wore that Friday night is a Swoop Jacket from Henry’s. It’s probably my most-worn piece since I bought it late last year (as it should be, given the price). Round shoulders, voluminous body, and a little bit cropped, it seems to work in just about any context, unifying three primary themes of my wardrobe: workwear, military surplus, and ~designer~ minimalism. A true jack-of-all-trades piece.

I paired it with a ratty old denim shirt, my Orslow Super Dads, and, just for kicks, a stupid-looking pair of hikers. We didn’t end up doing karaoke (the spot was full-up for the night), but I would’ve been well-prepared if we had.

The night before, I went out to catch a show at the Fillmore. Dressing for gigs can be tricky: you need to keep yourself cool in cramped, crowded spaces, but you also need to put together something more than jeans and a t-shirt (I do, anyways). On top of that, you’re going to be surrounded by hundreds of dancing/chatting/drinking people, so you need to be prepared for spilled drinks, stomped feet, and other sundry intrusions on your personal space. The rock club is not the place for the $80 suit.

With this in mind, I turned to the rotation again, this time for a vintage Polo Harrington. Thin, baggy, and 100% synthetic, it’s the ideal jacket for a Thursday night gig—warm enough outdoors, cool enough indoors. On top of that, it’s plain as can be. Many pieces say something, whether through patterns, textures, or labels. This jacket says nothing. It’s a silent garment. Sometimes that’s exactly what I want.

I wore it with an outrageously striped vintage Polo OCBD (sometimes I like going Polo-on-Polo, the same way I do denim-on-denim) and the Orslows. Down below, I laced up a pair of Wallabees. They’re a great concert-going shoe. Soles are thick and cushy, giving you an extra inch or two to peep the stage over heads, and the silhouette is charmingly clunky.

The night before that, I went out for dinner with friends. We hit HK Lounge Bistro in SoMa, a tiny little room tucked into the corner of a new-build apartment building on Folsom St. It didn’t look like much from the outside, but it turned out to be the best Chinese I’ve had in recent memory: tender char siu, perfect shumai, coffee glazed ribs served with a dollop of whipped cream, and a wildly rich thousand layer egg yolk cake for dessert. Highly recommended next time you’re in downtown San Francisco.

And you better believe I went to the rotation—this time for a piece from Lemaire, which they simply call their Boxy Jacket. A cross between a trucker and a French chore coat, it somehow looks like neither while offering the best of both: the cropped, square shape of the former, and the generous pockets of the latter. Dig the lapels, which nod in the direction of tailoring without going any further. Another investment piece to be sure—but hell, that’s why it’s in the rotation.

I paired it with a ratty old workshirt I picked up on eBay for $15, the Orslows (sensing a theme?), and Paraboot Michaels, for some double French fried bon vivant type-shit.

So it was a good week: dinner with the homies, a show, and a Friday night in Oakland. I was ready to chill by the time the weekend rolled around, but something struck me first thing Saturday morning, so I hopped in the car and zipped downtown to pick up a grip of bagels from the recently-opened Loveski (the nutritional yeast bagel is great, especially with a nice schmear of their fermented onion cream cheese). This last little outing gave me a chance to hit for the cycle with the final jacket in the rotation.

Someday I’ll write about my Barbour in greater detail, but for now, suffice it to say that it’s been around the world with me over the past dozen years and shows no signs of slowing down. It’s the ultimate constant: the longest-serving piece in my wardrobe, something I never tire of wearing. It works great on frigid stormy nights on the streets of various European capitals, and it works just as well with a t-shirt and jeans on a dawning day in San Francisco.

Other jackets will come and go, but not this one.

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I wore this on Friday, February 13th.

Every Friday afternoon, my wife and I take a long walk with our dog through one of the many beautiful parks we’re blessed with here in San Francisco. Usually we go to McLaren Park, a rambling wilderness just up the hill from our home in the Excelsior district, but this day we rolled over to Bernal for a trek up and down its namesake Heights. We hadn’t been in a while, not since a run-in with the local coyote pack last year (everything turned out fine, despite our dog’s best efforts).

I’m glad we went back. As long as we keep the dog on-leash near the coyote den, there’s nothing to worry about. And the views are extraordinary:

Anyway, I wore jeans for our walk. What else would I do?

Denim is a noble fabric. Honest, hardworking, forthright—what we all aspire to be, or ought to. Through frays, fades, and rips, it attests to the lives we lead while wearing it. Nearly every piece of clothing looks better with some mileage on it, but this is especially true of denim. See the market for pre-distressed pieces, with a false sense of history baked right in.

Many of the most important garments of my life have been made of denim. The Krew-brand skinny jeans I adopted in ~2005, way ahead of the curve; the Levi’s Type III with the embroidered GIRLS patch sewn on the back; the American Apparel shirts I lived in between the years 2011 and 2014—all gone, never forgotten. Some sense of my identity is wrapped up the indigo weft. Utilitarian, plainspoken, hardy. Californian, above all else. Denim is the fabric of my people.

It’s also something I’ve been wearing less of recently, at least when it comes to pants. As I’ve documented, I’ve invested serious time and energy (not to mention money) in my wardrobe over the last several years—turns out I was “looksmaxxing” before such a term even existed.

Part of this process has been adopting a more intentional approach to dressing. I don’t want to just have clothes on, I want to wear them. In general, this project has been an overwhelming success: I’m considerably (and consistently) more satisfied with the way I look and, by extension, the statements I make. It has, however, had a few unintended consequences. Chief among them: the desertion of denim.

For years, jeans were simply my default state. If I was going out of my house, I was doing so in denim pants. Today, I almost always find myself opting for alternatives—not because I don’t dig jeans, but because they symbolize another era of my life, and another iteration of myself, which I’m attempting to move beyond. Dressing intentionally, in other words, has become synonymous with “not wearing jeans.” But it doesn’t have to be that way. I can have my cake and eat it, too.

I’m calling it now: 2026 is the year of jeans. For me, anyways.

It helps that I have a handsome new pair in my wardrobe. These are the orSlow Super Dads. Made in Japan, 100% cotton, heavyweight 13.5oz denim—quality through and through. It’s the fit that really makes them, though: high rise, wide, and straight as an arrow. No distressing, no elastane, no taper, none of that bullshit. Just put them on and walk out the door. Easy as that.

I’ve been a Levi’s man for years—what’s a pair of jeans without the red tab and those iconic back pockets? But I’m feeling good about the switch. Levi’s tend to be cut narrow in the thighs, which is a bad fit for me and my tree trunk legs. Quality can be hit-or-miss, too. I still wouldn’t call Levi’s a fast-fashion brand, but the brutal pressures of the fashion industry and international supply chains have them headed in that direction. I could always go down the vintage denim rabbit hole and start sourcing legit MiUSA specimens, but that seems to be self-defeating. The beauty of jeans is that you don’t really need to think about them. Why turn them into a fetish object (and an expensive one at that)?

One of the best things about denim is its flexibility. Walking the dog, running errands, going out to dinner, hitting a show—I can do it all in jeans. And I have been.

I wore this, for instance, on February 4th, for an evening meeting of my men-only book club (we’re reading Moby-Dick).

This is basically just jeans and a denim shirt (I’m a sucker for denim-on-denim), but the jacket and the Wallabees tighten things up a bit. The dark wash of the Super Dads helps, too. I typically prefer a nice stonewash, but darker denim works in a greater variety of contexts.

I wore this, on the other hand, on February 14th, to hit the farmer’s market (salute to the great Alemany Farmer’s Market, the first in the state of California) while having some work done on my car.

I’m wearing an undershirt I slept in, a workshirt I grabbed off a chair, and Calzuros. This is about one step away from going out in pajamas, but the jeans save it. I’m sure another pair of pants could’ve worked, but I would’ve had to think about which, and why, and whether a different shirt might not have been a better choice, and on and on. That was something I just didn’t want to deal with (especially not on Valentine’s Day).

Call it intentionally unintentional. That’s denim.

The following is an introduction to a lengthy interview I conducted with Dan Bejar on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of Destroyer’s Rubies. Read the full interview on Aquarium Drunkard.

aquariumdrunkard.com

Easy-listening, middle-of-the-road, simplified: these are the terms Dan Bejar used, on an afternoon in early December, to describe Destroyer’s Rubies, one of the most exquisite rock records released in the 21st century. They’re certainly not the phrases I would use to describe the album, but hell, I’m not the one who made it.

Rubies was released twenty years ago next month, the band name knit directly into the title of the record, as if its ten songs might be mistaken for the work of some other artist without explicit credit. These weren’t just anyone’s Rubies, they were Destroyer’s Rubies—as if there could be any question. The voice alone was signature enough, to say nothing of the first song’s first lines: “Duelling cyclones jackknife / They got eyes for your wife / And the blood that lives in her heart.” Who else but Bejar?

An immediate, obvious masterpiece, the album capped a remarkable decade of toil, daring, and restlessness for the man behind Destroyer. Across six increasingly impressive records, Bejar had managed to chart a crooked course from lo-fi bedroom oddball to sure-handed glam rocker to neurotic synthesizer fetishist. Along the way, he also found time to lend his talents to Canadian supergroup The New Pornographers, contributing a much-needed note of acid to indie pop classics like Electric Version and Twin Cinema. Though Bejar would continue working with the Pornos for some number of years, Rubies made it clear that his artistic destiny was his and his alone.

A synthesis of all Destroyer had ever been up until that point, Rubies is a bounty, a record bursting at the seams with undeniable tunes. The first side is one of the strongest sequences ever put to tape, each track building on what came before, pacing further along toward an uncertain catharsis: the magisterial title track, an epic poetic vision that stands alongside “Tangled Up In Blue” and “Changing of the Guards” as one of the all-time great album openers; the rollicking “Your Blues” and the fist-pumping “European Oils,” a doubleshot of hard, edgy folk-rock; the mesmerizing “Painter In Your Pocket,” a magic trick of a track. All perfect rock songs—and all prelude, too.

Catharsis arrives, finally, with “Looters’ Follies,” the lush, drunken waltz at the album’s heart. Extraordinary phrases tumble haphazardly out of Bejar’s mouth, colliding with one another, stacking, steadily, into a pyre ready to be set ablaze. Eventually the band obliges, exploding into a thicket of guitars as Bejar snarls the song’s shockingly triumphant conclusion: “Now step out of the darkness and into the light / Yeah it’s common knowledge I’ve been doin’ alright.” I’m still not sure exactly what he’s getting at with that line, but I don’t need to be. The truth of the song is right there in my ears, burning, swooning, braying with all the gusto of a man who knows he’s at the top of his game.

Which he undoubtedly was. Rubies is not always my favorite Destroyer record—that, like favorite Dylan, changes with the day; there is too much brilliance across too many records to firmly settle on one eternal favorite. It is, however, the best Destroyer record: consistent, nuanced, equal parts enervating and energizing. The record sounds effortless, as if these songs were always there, hovering unseen, waiting to be plucked out of the air and given form by Bejar and his murderous band of Vancouverites. Even after twenty years, I would not change a second. This is as close to perfect as rock records get.

Even more remarkable is that Bejar was just getting started. Five years after Rubies, he exploded the concept of what Destroyer could be with Kaputt, another one of this century’s finest records. The next in a long series of stylistic shifts for Bejar, Kaputt’s smooth studio rock accidentally intersected with the indie rock zeitgeist circa 2011. The album became a touchstone of the era, launching Bejar to levels of (relative) stardom he had never anticipated and didn’t necessarily want. Naturally, he followed his big break with Five Spanish Songs, a brief EP that hit the brakes on Destroyer’s industry momentum by delivering exactly what its title promised. “The English language seemed spent, despicable, not easily singable,” Bejar announced in the accompanying press release. “It felt over for English. Good for business transactions, but that’s about it.”

Fortunately for us all, Bejar and the English language soon made up. For the last decade, he has turned out immaculate, adventurous Destroyer LPs with all the regularity of a production line: the bravado Poison Season, the spare, sublime ken, the icy pandemic-era bookends Have We Met and Labyrinthitis. Last year, Bejar inaugurated a whole new era with Dan’s Boogie, a tidy record that managed to reconcile the many previous iterations of Destroyer while simultaneously pointing towards undiscovered territory.

There has never been a better time to be in the business of Dan Bejar, a statement as true today as it was twenty years ago, the day Rubies was released. As you’ll read in the following conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, the album was a hinge point in the history of Destroyer. Things were one way before, and they were another way after—simple as.

A disclaimer: this piece was initially envisioned as a personal retrospective of Rubies on the occasion of its 20th anniversary, supplemented by a few choice thoughts from Bejar. I shot him an interview request, he graciously accepted, and we caught up shortly after the conclusion of Destroyer’s most recent European tour. I had a few nebulous concepts going in, and I drafted a sequence of questions designed to prod the conversation in those general directions. With any luck, Dan’s thoughts would align with mine, and I would get a couple solid quotes to deploy throughout my write up. As we started speaking, it quickly became apparent that the interview wasn’t a supplement to the piece. It was the piece.

Making great art and discussing great art are distinct skills. To the extent that a person is talented at one, they are typically untalented at the other—that’s why artists are artists and critics are critics. Bejar is the rarest of breeds: someone equally adept at both. When dealing with such a man, it’s best to simply get out of his way. Anything I might add would only be a distraction.

Even as humble interlocutor, I’m proud to be a part of this number.

aquariumdrunkard.com

About two years ago, I made up my mind to remake my wardrobe.

As the pandemic faded and I returned to a real life once and for all, I found myself doing so in the clothes of another man—someone younger and less self-assured (not to mention a little bit thinner). The world had changed, and I had changed with it. Continuing to wear the same styles and silhouettes I had during the first Trump term seemed to be a denial of this fact.

I didn’t want to discard my entire image, but I did want to re-evaluate it and determine what worked, what didn’t, and why. In short, I wanted to be intentional about dressing myself, the same way I’m intentional about what records I listen to, what food I eat, and what people I consort with.

To manage this process, I spun up a spreadsheet. I couldn’t buy everything I wanted to right away, but I could catalog it. Over time, I could also track these purchases, giving me insight into how my wardrobe was and wasn’t changing. Was I over-indexed on jackets? How long had it been since I bought new socks? Was I paying too much attention to pants? The spreadsheet revealed all (including the fact that you can never pay too much attention to pants).

Now that I’m several years into this journey, I have a bit of perspective on what I’ve accomplished and where I want to go in the future—hence this exercise. In the spirit of “showing my work,” I’m including prices along with each item. Building a wardrobe necessitates spending a bit of money, but it’s less than you might think. Many of the following pieces are reliable basics I spend all day in or eBay finds that I nabbed for next-to-nothing.

Dressing well is not at all a matter of simply spending more money. Indeed, spending less on certain things allows me to spend a bit more on a few extraordinary items. Intentionality, remember?

2025 was a great year of buying and wearing clothes. These were my absolute favorites.

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Vintage Ralph Lauren Harrington Jacket

A simple lightweight jacket that goes with everything.

Jackets are often the trickiest element of an outfit (not to mention most expensive). Finding the right one to pair with such-and-such a look is a delicate art. I can’t explain the rules, but I know when I see it: either it works, or it doesn’t. Sometimes this is a fun puzzle to solve. Other times, I don’t want to think too hard—I just want to throw on a jacket and walk out the door. This is the jacket I can always do that in.

Cut wide and a little bit cropped, so that it slouches down and hits below my natural waist. A bit warmer in color IRL than it appears in the photo. Has an undeniable whiff of “normcore” to it, which gives it a great deal of utility. I don’t want to “dress normal,” but I also don’t want to look like I’m trying to not “dress normal.” Dig?

$40 // Original eBay listing

Casatlantic Linen Tanger Trousers

Double-pleated, billowy, and deliciously high-rise, I lived in these all summer.

The linen these pants are cut from is remarkable: thick, plush, and woven in a subtle herringbone pattern. I wouldn’t call them heavy-duty—it’s still linen—but the weight of the fabric really makes you feel like you can live your life. They drape beautifully, right down to the cuffs I had my tailor install. The pants come unhemmed, allowing you to customize the length as you see fit. I went a little long on these, giving myself a nice solid break that typically expresses itself somewhere between my calf and ankle.

Elevated enough to wear for ~occasions~ but not at all fussy. I loved bumming around in these, an undershirt, and any old top layer: chambray, denim, or even more linen. Already counting down the days until I can bust them out again.

$220 // casatlantic.com

Everybody.World Boxier Tees

My new default tees: wide, a little bit cropped, and, at 6.5 oz, just heavy enough.

As much as I enjoy putting together a novel and exciting ensemble, the truth is that I’m at home for a computer job ~40 hours a week. I could get fully dressed up each morning, but wearing great clothes loses some of its thrill if you’re not out in the real world. This being the case, I tend to default to steady basics that can get me through a full day of computer, dog walks, resistance training, podcasting, and so on. These tees from Everybody.World do that job best.

The secret sauce is the length. Most modern tshirts are cut long so that they can be worn with low-rise trousers. This gives the wearer a tubular, sausage-like silhouette that I find deeply unappealing.

Since I wear my pants at my natural waist (just above the belly button), I can wear shorter shirts without exposing my midriff. The Everybody.World tees hit me just wear I want them to, and they’re cut with plenty of slack across the shoulders and chest for a loose, drape-y fit. Available in both short and long sleeve, and in all manner of attractive colors.

$40 (short sleeve), $44 (long sleeve) // everybody.world

Vintage Ralph Lauren Chino Shorts

Hardy shorts with wide thighs, a short inseam, and a handsome patina.

“Vintage Ralph Lauren X” is the search term that never fails. I didn’t even know I wanted these shorts until I stumbled across them in some insomniac eBay scroll session. It pays to pay attention to average prices of eBay listing. Plenty of stuff out there is listed at or above fair market price. If you know what that price is, it makes it easy to pull the trigger on a listing like this. At $27, I couldn’t afford not to.

Double pleated, with a classic 6” length. Seams and stitching faded to a nice robin’s egg blue, a few frays just starting to express themselves for a bit of character. Generously wide through the hem—an absolute necessity for me and my cyclist thighs.

$27 // Original eBay listing

Maximum Henry Braided Standard Belt

A simple belt that works with jeans, suits, and anything else.

Belts can be deceptively difficult. I tend to want something functional and quiet, but not so bland as to disappear completely. I’m also looking for something made of natural materials that will look better, not worse, as it ages. No plastic “vegan leather” for me, thanks.

Maximum Henry goods check all those boxes. The belts are made to order in New York City, allowing you to dial in your exact preferences in terms of width, leather color, and hardware color. This one is 1.25” wide, deep brown, with a silver buckle. I ordered mine a few inches long so that I can knot it up at the end (and to give myself a little room to grow in the future…).

Styles will come and go, but belts are here to stay. I fully expect this one to last a lifetime.

$160 // maximumhenry.com

Foxfibre®️ Crew Socks

Daily driver socks made from organic, dye-free cotton grown, spun, and knit in these United States.

For the last several years, my sock collection has been composed of two primary types of socks: the Los Angeles Apparel Unisex Sock, good for wear with sneakers and hikers; and over-the-calf dress socks that pair with loafers, bluchers, and so on. These live somewhere in between. They’re shorter and a bit thinner than the Los Angeles Apparel socks, but hardier than the dress socks. As such, they go with everything in my shoe rotation. Keens and Bedrock Mountain Clogs make a particularly nice match with the short, slack fit.

The central appeal, however, is the fabric. Sally Fox developed her namesake cotton to grow in a variety of warm, natural hues that obviate the need for dyes. In an increasingly plastic world drowning in vulgar, synthetic fabrics, it’s reassuring to walk around all day in entirely natural fibers (or almost entirely—there’s a bit of nylon woven in for a tight, elastic fit). Extra credit for the MiUSA aspect, not only from an economic angle, but also from an environmental one.

$33 (3 pack) // unbleachedapparel.com

Earth\Studies ESCEP Jacket

A functional, asymmetric riff on the classic fleece zip-up.

One of the more recent additions to my wardrobe, this jacket has already proved its worth. In pitch dark San Francisco mornings, I need a solid top layer I can just throw on to walk the dog and make coffee—something big, soft, and warm. Recently, I realized the Patagonia Synchilla I had relied on for years was no longer doing it for me: too thin for frigid 5:45 AM temperatures, too tight around the chest and upper arms.

The Earth\Studies ESCEP solves both problems and more. With full, rounded shoulders and generous sleeves, the jacket gives me plenty of room to maneuver. The superthick fleece is dyed an odd, compelling shade of brown that somehow, in certain lights, seems to verge on purple. It’s also finished with all sorts of functional details: double-zipper enclosure, cinchable neck for extra-cold afternoons, and a jumbo cargo pocket on the left side, perfect for carrying around dog leashes, bags of coffee, and whatever else I find myself toting around on a daily basis.

Certainly not the least-expensive thing on this list, but for something I wear five days a week or more, a price I’m more than happy to pay.

$295 // earth-studies.com

The $80 Suit

Exactly what it sounds like.

Written about here in great detail. I’ve since worn it on several other occasions, and I had a great time each time.

$80 // Original eBay listing

Vintage Armani Ties

The perfect accoutrements for an $80 suit.

I bought a lot of four vintage Armani ties on eBay for about $40, plus one more (pictured on the left in the above image) for $15, so together they shook out to about $12 a pop. Made in Italy, 100% silk, in a variety of loud designs straight out of 1991. Kitsch-ish, but not kitschy. What else do you need?

I’d love to invest in a few Drake’s ties at some point, but until I’m wearing one day-in day-out, I’ll stick with vintage.

~$12 each // Original eBay listing

Henry’s Swoop Jacket

A deeply satisfying splurge.

Every Henry’s piece is handmade in Toronto by owner Keith Henry. A few times a year, he drops a fresh batch of pants and jackets that sells out instantly. Given the limitations of his one-man operation, prices are necessarily high. But you get what you pay for. Everything Henry makes is simple, well-proportioned, and extremely well made. There’s an honesty to his approach. Making quality clothes takes time and money, a fact often obscured by international supply chains, questionable labor practices, and the noxious incentives of the fast fashion industry. This is the price you pay for ethical consumption.

The Swoop Jacket is Henry’s signature style. This particular specimen is cut from a heavyweight cotton moleskine in a pleasant shade of olive green. So far, it seems to go with just about anything: wool trousers, double-knees, and everything in between.

Simple, flexible, and utterly striking. I can’t wait to put some miles on this thing.

$669 // wearhenrys.com

Against my better judgment, I still post on X.com.

The place is an incontrovertible sewer, full of racists, sycophants, and bots, and I will forever loathe Elon Musk for his systematic destruction of a website that once meant a great deal to me. But the fact remains that that website did once exist, and I once invested a considerable portion of myself into it. I’ve been alive for 33 years, and I’ve been on @ian__grant for 17—over half my life. Whether I like it or not, it is a historical record of my time on earth.

Were I a wiser man, I would nuke the whole thing. Surely, no good will ever come of my younger self’s idle thoughts. Unfortunately, I’m too much of a sentimentalist. There’s something romantic about it to me, this accidental diary composed of emotional outbursts, mental flotsam, and ticky-tack. Occasionally, I find myself scrolling backwards through the years, peering as best I can through these small, misshapen windows into a life that once belonged to me but no longer does. This, more than any other reason, is why I remain active on the site: not to reach others today, but to reach myself tomorrow.

Such is the purpose of this exercise. Though I no longer ~keep up~ with the new music scene to the extent that I once did, I do still, well, listen to new music. Some of this music corresponds to what’s appearing on other year-end list, but some (most?) does not. If I want future me to remember what it was like to live and listen through 2025, it’s up to current me to make it plain.

So here they are: the best records of 2025—a few of them, anyways. I’ve only heard a fraction of the albums released over the past 12 months; consequentially, this list is incomplete. Consider it a portrait not of the contemporary music ecosystem, but rather, of my music ecosystem.

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10. Neil Young & The Chrome Hearts: Talkin To The Trees

It should go without saying that this is not actually the tenth best record released in 2025, but I did just rank it tenth on a Best Albums of the Year list, so here I am saying it.

Unlike Bob Dylan, octogenarian Neil Young is a diminished creative force. Most of the songs on this album consist of lazy moon/june rhymes delivered atop Intro To Guitar-level chords patterns. Two of the ten tracks—fully 20% of the material here—are rewrites of “This Land Is Your Land.” One of them, “Lets Roll Again,” may be the worst song Neil has ever written: “If you’re a fascist then get a Tesla / If it’s electric, it doesn’t matter / If you’re a Democrat, then taste your freedom.” It’s difficult to believe this is the best anyone can do, let alone Neil fucking Young.

But apparently it is, and here he is doing it. There’s something inspiring about it all, writing and recording and releasing songs so bad they make listeners question whether the good stuff was really ever that good in the first place (it was). The title track and “Thankful,” two quiet, tuneful ballads working in the Harvest Moon palette, are reason enough for the rest of the record to exist.

My my, hey hey, rock and roll is here to stay—whether or not we want it to.

MORE: “Talkin To The Trees” discussed in depth on Never Ending Stories

9. Benjamin Booker — LOWER

A totally unexpected reinvention from Benjamin Booker, and an object lesson in sticking with artists—even the younger ones—over the years.

His first release in nearly a decade, LOWER bears little resemblance to the punky blues rock Booker made his name on. The sound is situated somewhere around the muddy nexus of rock, electronic, hip-hop, and punk—and even that feels like an incomplete descriptor. Songs are dark, stripped-down, beat-forward, but still raw, warm, and emotional. Dispatched with all my preconceived notions instantly and continues to surprise.

Think “love songs written by Death Grips” and you’re not far off.

MORE: my interview with Benjamin on Jokermen

8. Dirty Projectors — Song of The Earth

On the note of radical reinventions: see David Longstreth’s madcap orchestral cycle Song of The Earth.

Released under both his own name and that of his long-running band, Song of The Earth calls into question the relationship between an individual artist and their collaborators. Certainly, this is music from the same mind behind Swing Lo Magellan and Bitte Orca; just dig those ecstatic YEAH YEAHs on “Gimme Bread,” bounding out of the stereo with all the gusto of a horror movie jump-scare. Instead of a ruddy indie rock palette, however, what follows is an hour-plus of horns and strings and flutes—lots and lots of flutes.

It may seem imposing from afar, but in reality Song of The Earth is compulsively listenable. It’s a vibes record, as unlikely as that may seem. Just let it roll from the top and look out the window, as Longstreth and co. reproduce the wonders of the natural world through intricate, extraordinary orchestration. Just don’t hit shuffle.

MORE: my interview with David on Jokermen

7. Ariel Pink — With You Every Night

His first LP since becoming an indie rock pariah, Ariel Pink’s With You Every Night is a poignant reminder of all we stand to lose from the intermingling of politics and popular culture.

It is almost certainly too late for Pink to salvage his career. For the liberals that once made up most of his audience, his endless stream of right-wing hooey has permanently stunk up the joint, while the groypers and Fox News aunts that might be attracted by such statements are too brain-damaged to find anything of value in art. If he were to mount a comeback, however, it would start with something like this: a smooth collection of indelible hooks and pop-rock pastiche.

After all his antics, I can’t begrudge anyone who has permanently stationed Pink on the “pay no mind” list. At the same time, I can’t pretend I didn’t devote years of my life to this man and his idiosyncratic musical vision. It worked for me then, and it works for me now, as much as I may be loath to admit it.

A useful exercise in separating the art and the artist, if nothing else.

MORE: my review of “With You Every Night”

6. Big Thief — Double Infinity

The first Big Thief record of their post-imperial period, and maybe their best yet.

After nearly four years away—an eternity in Big Thief time—Double Infinity landed with a thud a few months ago, dismissed as slight, cringe, and/or uninspired. It was a clear departure from the totalizing, dead-simple brilliance of Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You; as such, it was bound to disappoint. Some critics claimed Double Infinity was a preview of a diminished future for Big Thief, particularly in light of bassist Max Oleartchik’s departure, which may or may not have had anything to do the genocide Israel continued to prosecute throughout 2025.

This, to me, seems to be a clear misreading of the album. While it’s true that Double Infinity is a smaller, messier collection of songs, this wasn’t an accident. After losing a founding member, the band was faced with a choice: limp along as if nothing had changed, or blow it all up and become something new. Fortunately for us all, they chose the latter option. They are searching for a new sound. I have no doubt they will find it.

Double Infinity is a snapshot in time, a portrait of a rock band in flux. Big Thief is no longer what they were, but neither are they what they will be. How exciting.

MORE: my review of “Double Infinity”

5. Wednesday — Bleeds

Just a great rock record: nothing more, nothing less.

I missed the boat on Rat Saw God a few years ago, willfully ignoring the unanimous album of the year for no reason in particular. How glad I am that I rethought this approach. Karly Hartzman was born to front a rock band, and the loud/quiet/loud sequencing on Bleeds is balanced to a tee.

“Phish Pepsi” is the funniest song I’ve heard in years.

4. Bob Dylan — Through The Open Window: The Bootleg Series, Vol. 18

If The Bootleg Series were an artist itself, it would be on the oldies circuit.

34 years in, we’ve been graced with the most audacious entry yet, a content-dump of breathtaking breadth charting the evolution of a young Robert Zimmerman into Bob Dylan, the gunslinger poet. It’s all here, from homemade acetates to party tapes to cutting room floor material from Columbia Studios. Recording quality varies wildly, but that’s sort of the point. As a great man once said, quantity has a quality all its own.

Essential stuff for any and all Bobheads out there, even those (like me) who have had their fill of the early days. One of the most satisfying listening experiences I can remember, even as I barely made it through once. I’ll be coming back to this one for years.

MORE: “Through The Open Window” discussed in depth on Never Ending Stories

3. Destroyer — Dan’s Boogie

As much as I’ve loved any of the albums discussed so far, three stood out above and beyond them all. This, in a sense, is where this list really begins.

Dan Bejar is the most predictable man in rock songs. Every two-ish years, he returns with another sublime collection of tunes, embarks on a worldwide tour with his murderous backing band, then disappears into the mists of British Columbia until he’s ready to do it all over again. I’ve been tuned into this cycle for well over a decade—2013’s Five Spanish Songs, 2015’s Poison Season, 2017’s ken., 2020’s Have We Met, 2022’s LABRYNTHITIS—and it has yet to disappoint. It sure didn’t this year.

A streamlined package showcasing the many different sides of the Destroyer project, Dan’s Boogie sustained me through the long, slow winter of 2025. There’s something here for fans of any iteration of the band: the entry-level Kaputt listener (“Cataract Time”), the late-era electronoclast (“Bologna”), the Rubies nostalgist (“Sun Meet The Snow”), and more. And for us Destroyer omnivores? It’s a veritable cornucopia. We are eating.

Another brick in the wall of the most consistent discography of the 21st century. I can’t wait to hear what’s next.

MORE: our interview with Dan on Never Ending Stories + my review of “Dan’s Boogie” on Aquarium Drunkard

2. Cass McCombs — Interior Live Oak

A sprawling, casually ambitious double LP that serves as both a summation of a 20+ year career and an accessible point of entry point for any and all newcomers.

Cass is one of the 21st century’s great songwriters: direct, obtuse, emotional, cerebral, poetic, profound, wickedly funny, and many more adjectives besides. He’s also, in his own quiet way, a rock star. Catch the man live and you’ll clock it right away, as soon as he peels off one of the mondo riffs that forms the backbone of so many of the tracks on Interior Live Oak. “Priestess,” “Who Removed The Cellar Door?,” and above all “Asphodel:” these are some of the very finest rock songs money can buy.

A major statement that went criminally overlooked by most publications, as almost every Cass record is. Put this one on in the car, hop on the freeway, and just cruise. Doesn’t matter where, as long as its in California.

MORE: our interview with Cass on Never Ending Stories + my review of “Interior Live Oak” on Aquarium Drunkard

1. Geese — Getting Killed

Of course it is.

So much has been written about this band recently, it feels pointless to even try to come up with anything more. Surely, whatever I have to say has already been better said somewhere else. I might have even been the one to say it.

In the context of this extremely minor, entirely subjective list, the most I can offer is this: it takes a lot to get me to listen to a new band at this point. I’ve heard all of it—or almost all of it—before, and if I haven’t, I probably wouldn’t like it. So to not only devote a considerable amount of time to a new release from a new artist, but for said release to also be the best album I heard all year, and by some margin? It’s a remarkable thing.

Fitting, for such a remarkable record.

MORE: Geese and the Getting Killed Tour discussed on Never Ending Stories

I have, not entirely accidentally, become a professional music critic.

The active part of this job consists primarily of talking or writing about music. These are things I enjoy doing, and they take up a few hours of my time each week. In order to do them, however, I need to devote much more time to passive tasks, one in particular: listening. I listen to so much goddamn music.

Surely, I could get away with listening to less, but in general, I like doing it, even when the music is bad. An inexhaustive list of what I’ve been spending time spinning recently: Slightly American Music, the bootleg compilation of Brian Wilson’s unreleased collaborations with Andy Paley from the mid-90s; a tape of Bob Dylan’s positively exquisite performance at the Hammersmith Apollo on November 24th, 2003; Stars & Stripes Vol. 1, the depressingly half-assed collection of Beach Boys country covers from 1996; Traveling Wilburys Vol. 3, the charmingly half-assed swan song from Boo, Spike, Clayton, and Muddy Wilbury. Subjects, one and all, of recent or upcoming podcasts in the Jokermen universe. Call it “business listening.”

I do still have time for pleasure listening, but less than I used to. I need to be discerning about what I spend it on. I’m not always looking for a return on my investment, but it’s nice when I can get one. The fact that I’m even thinking along these lines—of time as a finite resource, of records as equities to be bought and sold on an exchange—proves my point. Would I prefer not to view my entire life through a marketized lens? Absolutely. But in this reality, it’s hard not to. Such is life (mine, anyways).

All of which is to say, I don’t get to listen to all the music I want to as much I want to. Typically, this doesn’t pose too big a problem. This week, however, it did. This week I saw Grizzly Bear.

Like many other Grizzly Bear fans, I was the just right age (17) at just the right time (2009) for them to become one of the bands for me. Along with Merriweather Post Pavilion and Bitte Orca, Veckatimest formed a holy trinity of releases from that year—three unimpeachable classics working in distinct, but complementary, palettes. Merriweather was the delicious one, full of candy-colored synthesizers and massive hooks that were just weird enough to put certain people off. Bitte Orca was the rangy one, a consciously high-art collection of cubist songs that were more than happy to be misunderstood. Veckatimest was the warm one: ruddy and a little bit mannered, close enough to the Fleet Foxes/Bon Iver folk revival scene to hook sad little lads like myself, but still a full-throated rock record at its core.

And it wasn’t just Veckatimest. It was Yellow House, a deliberate, clattery record closer in spirit to the rustic strangeness of Sung Tongs or Feels; it was In Ear Park, the lovely, unassuming release from Daniel Rossen’s side project Department of Eagles; it was the cover of “He Hit Me,” an ironic genderfucked reinterpretation of a sickening, undeniably beautiful Crystals classic. Then, several years later, it was Shields, a knockout followup to Veckatimest that arrived at precisely the wrong moment, as the indie rock vanguard of the previous decade scattered to the wind, undone by a toxic combination of algorithms, poptimism, and a declining rate of profit in the touring industry.

I saw Grizzly Bear for the last time on the Shields tour, on a warm, cloudless night at the Greek Theater in Los Angeles. It was a powerhouse show: ornate, muscular, perfectly suited for the dark hills and dusky spirits of Griffith Park. The band, it seemed, was well on their way to festival headliner status—the next Arcade Fire, say, or LCD Soundsystem, an undeniable force able to walk the narrow line between artistic legitimacy and commercial success.

This, as it turns out, didn’t prove quite right. Grizzly Bear was not the next Arcade Fire or LCD Soundsystem—they would not, thank god, go on to embarrass themselves with faux profundity, crypto festival appearances, or the innumerable personal and professional missteps that Win Butler has devoted the past fifteen years of his life to making. Instead, they would just kinda chill. After the subdued release of Painted Ruins in 2017, Grizzly Bear drifted into an unofficial hiatus. Ed Droste began pursuing a therapy license, Rossen and drummer Chris Bear continued collaborating on side projects and film scores, and Chris Taylor continued to look supremely stylish (he also, presumably, did other things with his time). In this way, they became Schrödinger’s band, simultaneously alive and dead as long as no one said otherwise.

Now, for reasons unknown, they are back together and doing it again, on a tour that isn’t being billed as a reunion but nevertheless feel like one. I am back, too. I owe them that much.

When I bought a ticket for the show half a year ago, I planned to start studying up well in advance. I was pretty sure the records held up, but I hadn’t listened to them consistently in years, and I wasn’t at all certain how much would still be familiar to me. Unfortunately, life got in the way—business listening, remember?—so a single spin of Yellow House and Shields the day before the show was the most I could manage.

Turns out, I didn’t need anything more. Everything slid right back into place, long-forgotten melodies and rhythms blooming out of fallow patches of my brain. It all sounds great as ever; credit to my younger self for having such good taste. Shields in particular is a (re)revelation: ornate, rangy, nimble, heavy. If this record dropped today, critics would be falling over themselves to dub Grizzly Bear one of the most exciting rock acts of 2025.

Maybe they are anyways, judging by last night’s show. This is still immaculate music, as strange and robust and compelling as it ever was. It sounds even better live. From the first instant of the show, one thing is clear above all else: Grizzly Bear fucking rocks. Songs like “Sleeping Ute,” “Ready, Able,” and “While You Wait For The Others” kick as much ass as anything released this year. Rossen’s guitar is cranked to teeth-chattering levels, almost to the point of drowning out more delicate elements of the music. Lest this sound like a complaint, let me be clear: it isn’t. There is no such thing as a too-loud guitar.

The setlist was methodical, a well-paced tour through some (but not too many) of the greatest hits. There was lots of Veckatimest, but plenty of Yellow House and Shields too—shout out to main-set closer “Sun In My Eyes,” which sounded positively massive, Droste and Rossen’s water & oil vocals exploding out of the PA, consuming the entire theater. Many of the songs relied on the “Grizzly Bear formula,” for lack of a better term: precise, austere intro, steady build, and cathartic crescendo, a mess of chords and keys and various other components—a Horn of Plenty, if you will. The crowd ate it up, thrilled to see a touchstone of the Obama era back in such fine form. If you closed your eyes, you could almost imagine it was 2009 again, and you, Jay-Z, and Beyoncé were all bopping along to “Ready, Able” in Williamsburg…

As powerful as Grizzly Bear still is, it’s clear they have their roots in another era. There is a certain seriousness to the music that marks it as an artifact from an age when we weren’t all eternally online—when the computer was something that lived in its own room in the house, and a phone was something you made calls on. This isn’t to say the show is dour. Vibes last night were uniformly posi, Droste and Rossen both at ease and gently self-effacing, but there was a noticeable lack of irony and absurdity to the proceedings. You’re never gonna get a “houseboat docked at the Himbodome” out of these guys.

Not that you’d even want to. Still, I can’t help but wonder where this leaves Grizzly Bear, and what their future might look like. Clearly, these guys can still do it; despite some of Droste’s ambivalent comments about the nature of paying the bills by working in a rock band, I bet they even want to—at least some of the time. Whether the culture will allow them to is another matter. There’s little money in record-making these days, especially for acts that don’t cater specifically to the algorithm. Musicians have to make ends meet just like the rest of us—then they need to actually make music.

At one point, a band of Grizzly Bear’s caliber could do the former by doing the latter. These days, it isn’t quite so simple. As challenging as tour economics can be, reunion shows are one of the last remaining reliable income streams in the rock industry. It may not be everything we want from a given band, but it’s more than nothing. I’m happy to do my part and buy a ticket.

There’s nothing wrong with getting back together and doing it again—especially when it’s done this well.

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As a lad, my father and I bonded over the things all fathers and sons bond over: sports and media.

Most important was our shared affinity for rock music. He was a graduate of the early Los Angeles punk rock scene. As such, he took pride in his taste, remaining aware of and passionate about new bands well into middle age. Consequently, I was a bit precocious in this regard, and I got into “good” music much earlier than my peers. While other 13 year-olds at A.E. Wright Middle School spent most of 2006 listening to warmed-over classic rock of the most disreputable sort—KISS, Aerosmith, Bon Jovi—I was obsessing over the third Strokes record (secret masterpiece), the first Arctic Monkeys record (still holds up), and the second Keane record (look, nobody bats 1.000).

Not only did my father and I listen to these albums together, we also went to shows. In no particular order, some highlights from this general era, recalled off-top my head: The White Stripes at the Greek Theater in 2003; The Killers opening for Morrissey at the Fonda in 2004, pre-Hot Fuss; Franz Ferdinand somewhere (the Palladium maybe?) in 2005. It was a great time to be going to rock concerts, regardless of your age.

While I was younger than most of the people at these shows, my father was much older. Even then, I was dimly aware that this was something out of the ordinary, something special. The music belonged to me, but it meant a great deal to him too. He was a cultural trespasser, a generational traitor of the best kind. He knew what these experiences could mean to a young man—catching the right show in the right room at the right time. Decades earlier, he had been there himself. Now it was my turn.

He and I are both several decades older now, as is the medium that we love. We’ve hit our ups and downs, but we’ve muddled through it all—the manufactured hype cycles, the uninspired openers, the crowds full of chompers. The investment has paid off. Today, we’re in the midst of a new bull market for rock: MJ Lenderman, Wednesday, Alvvays, Big Thief, and many more.

Geese, of course, is the latest addition to this list. Their new LP, Getting Killed, is easily the best of a certain type of album to be released in 2025. It may also be the best album of the year full stop, but I’ve learned to hedge my bets a bit in my old age. There are too many lifers doing too many casually incredible things for me to write them all off in favor of the latest gaggle of New York twentysomethings.

Still, it’s clear that Getting Killed is the best record this year from a future great—a band destined to mean as much to a certain cohort of rock fans as Radiohead or The Strokes or Silver Jews mean to me. The songs on Getting Killed explode out of the stereo with so much life, so much rhythm, so much strangeness, you can’t help but dig it. It’s elemental. There’s no formula here, no way to explain why it all works as well as it does. And yet it does.

Every track on the record seems to preview a different potential future, from the crystalline guitar pop of “Taxes” to the bombed-out skronk rock of “Trinidad” to the downbeat pathos of “Au Pays du Cocaine.” Any one of these directions could sustain an entire career, but here they are, packed tight into one single album. “Cobra” is probably my single favorite song of the year: elastic, propulsive, catchy as hell and equally weird, with lead singer Cameron Winter doing something I’m compelled to describe as a Frank Sinatra impression while singing about a genealogical sense of shame. At three minutes four seconds, it’s not nearly long enough—the perfect length. Betcha can’t listen just once.

Judging by the reaction online, I’m not the only one that feels this way. The band recently made their network television debut, Getting Killed is a year-end list lock, and tickets for the current tour are pushing four figures on certain resale sites. For Geese, it’s all happening.

We’ve been here before, but that doesn’t make it any less thrilling. There is seeing a band, and then there is seeing a band at the moment. The moment drives people mad—makes them post incessantly about attending (🙋‍♂️); makes them walk up down the queue outside begging someone, anyone, to sell them a ticket; suffuses the entire area in and around the venue with a nervous, antic energy. This, I can confirm, is what it felt like at the beautiful Fillmore here in San Francisco this past Tuesday.

The many roving packs of Zoomers made one thing immediately, abundantly clear: Geese does not belong to me. My generation’s time in the sun is past, our moments fully behind us. The kids have come up from behind. That is fine—and certainly much better than the alternative. Thank god (some) rock music still means something to (some) young people.

To be sure, there were still plenty of aging Millennials about, even a few Xers, all of us hoping our belief in the moment would bear out. It’s a bit like trading equities. Plenty of people pile in eventually, but the earlier you invest, the greater the return. Catching Geese on this tour doesn’t mean you’re getting in on the seed round, maybe not even Series A or B, but it’s not long after the IPO. Assuredly, over these next several years, “line go up.” In certain cases, this turns bands into the artistic equivalent of a meme stock, a vehicle for clout arbitrage. This, I hoped, would not be the case with Geese.

Inside, it was buzzing, people flitting back and forth in the lobby finding friends, grabbing drinks, eating apples. The line for merch was a dozen deep, the main room seemingly already at capacity despite the hundreds still queued up outside. I picked my way up front, just beyond the perimeter of any pit that might form.

A man in a wide-brimmed leather hat struck up a conversation with me, asked me if I knew whether the band was playing the same set every night. I told him I wasn’t sure but that they didn’t have many songs so it was possible, and that he should check setlist.fm later to confirm. He had never heard of the website but was thrilled to learn it existed, and he asked me to repeat its name several times to ensure that he remembered it. I discovered later that he was high on DMT. Shortly thereafter, the band came on.

It was a simple stage set up: no screens, no banners, nothing for the audience to pay attention to beyond the players. This is the advantage of playing such a small room, and a big part of the reason people are so desperate to get into these shows. It’s an unmediated experience—just you, the band, and everyone else around you. The more people are wedged into loges, balconies, and distant corners, the more technology interferes. Sooner or later, the realities of touring economics will force the band into these venues.

But that’s a problem for another day. Today, the Geese show is simple, pure, natural. There’s an unmistakable whiff of the Velvet Underground to the set up: all black everything, dramatic lighting, little chatter between themselves or the crowd. Eventually, Winter starts cracking wise, but judiciously. When he does, the rest of the band hardly reacts.

They’re a New York band, in other words. They take themselves seriously—especially when in California.

Which is not to say it’s an overly-serious show. Things were buoyant from the jump, kids in the crowd trying and failing to sing along to Getting Killed highlights (Winter is a devilishly difficult singer to imitate, but that didn’t stop anyone at the Fillmore). Despite the fact that these songs have only been out in the world for a month, they all sounded like classics, and they were received as such. By the time the band hit the gas with the title track, the room was ready to explode. The pit burst open and young men barged past me, drawn like a magnet to all the sweat and spilled beer and elbows.

After running through half the new album, they shifted to the 3D Country material, and the night really got started. Moshing that had paused momentarily during “Half Real” resumed in earnest, in thrall to lead guitarist Emily Green. Winter and his mop top are obviously the stars of the show, but she provides a vital counterpoint on stage right: lithe, mysterious, cool as hell; a distinctly Cale-ian figure. Precise at certain points, blunt at others, always huge—on the old songs especially.

As great as it is, I don’t think 3D Country is nearly as strong as Getting Killed. It may, however, be better suited for live performance. Songs that feel like mazes on the album become skullcracking singalongs on stage. Everyone in the crowd seemed to know every line of every verse, turning simple refrains (“Get out, get under”) into opportunities for cathartic, communal release. The formal meaning of these words may remain obscure (“Chikki-chikki-cha, chikki-chikki-cha”), but the emotional meaning couldn’t be any clearer.

The last third of the show was devoted to the rest of Getting Killed. Everyone’s well aware of how special this record is, the band most of all; by the time the night was over, they’d played every single song. Winter sauntered over to the piano and led the crew through a positively vicious “Long Island City” to close the main set. They went through the whole encore charade (some things never change), then returned for a mellow take on “Domoto” and “4D Country,” clearly exhausted after 90 minutes of pure momentum, before wrapping for good with “Trinidad.” The crowd went over the edge, screaming, ecstatic. For Geese, “THERE’S A BOMB IN MY CAR” is destined to become their “LAST NITE, SHE SAID.”

I walked out sweaty as hell, exhausted, entirely satisfied. Best rock show I’ve seen all year, plain and simple.

And what of the moment? Undoubtedly, there’s an element of scarcity and #FOMO to this whole thing. The dream of the internet has manifested a reality in which every day presents another opportunity to tell someone “you had to be there.” If we’re being entirely honest, you didn’t: it’s only a concert, after all.

But in another sense, you did. Geese will never play rooms this small again. They will get bigger and better and, god willing, weirder, but for them, there will never be another moment. This is it. You can put whatever price you want on that.

For me, that price was zero—such are the perks of hosting a moderately successful rock music podcast. I would’ve gladly paid fifty bucks, and probably even a hundred; beyond that, it would’ve been hard to stomach. But I was only there on my own. One day, I’ll be going to these shows with a daughter or son of my own, a precious being for whom my old world is all new. They will be searching for their first moments, and I will do whatever I can to provide them, as my father did for me decades ago.

That’s the thing about rock songs: we keep getting older, but they stay the same age.

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I wore this on Saturday, October 4th.

My wife I went out to dinner at Verjus to celebrate our ninth half-anniversary. I call it our “half-anniversary” because it’s both the day of our first date (in 2016), and our engagement (in 2021). It’s also almost exactly half a year removed from our wedding anniversary (April 1st). Together, the two dates act as romantic solstices of a sort, biannual landmarks that are never too far off.

As I grow older, I find it important to remain attuned to occasions like these. In the squall of modern life, they are fleeting moments of safe harbor—a chance to sit, and to be with one other, and to enjoy a nice bottle of wine, and a plate of radishes and butter, and an after-dinner chartreuse. An added bonus: you get to wear great clothes.

I used the night as an opportunity to test drive a new suit ahead of fall/winter. Suiting can be a tricky concept for me. On the one hand: I love to wear suits, and I feel like I do it reasonably well. On the other hand, I don’t often have places to wear them. On top of that, the shape of my body tends to fluctuate. For a garment that has been tailored to a specific set of dimensions, this can pose a problem.

At present, I’m in the midst of a modest stretch of resistance training. Over the past five months, I’ve put on ~15 pounds of muscle through a “bulk” phase. I’m pleased with the way my body has changed, but it’s had an impact on the way some of my clothes fit. The sleeves of my O’Connell’s suit, for instance, are much tighter than when I wrote about it in March, and the pockets of the trousers flair, which indicates too tight a fit around the hips.

In the new year, I plan to shift out of the “bulk” phase into a “cut” phase, when I focus on losing weight as opposed to building muscle. This should bring my body and the suit back into alignment, but until then, I just have to make do. I can either wedge myself into an uncomfortable rig tailored for another person’s body, drop four figures on a whole new one, or simply abstain from suiting altogether. None of these are ideal options.

Enter: the $80 suit.

Generally, you get what you pay for with suits (up to a certain point, at least). Low-end suits will typically be machine-made, of inferior material, and/or the result of questionable labor practices. They’re also likely to be aimed at the lowest common stylistic denominator, meaning short jackets, thin lapels, and low-rise, slim-fit trousers: everything you want to avoid. Even if you’re willing to compromise on all these points (and you shouldn’t be), you’re still going to be dropping $500-$800—not an insignificant sum.

If you know what you’re looking for, however, vintage opportunities abound. A couple obvious facts: 1) millions of suits have been made over the past several decades, 2) most people don’t wear them anymore, and 3) they are tailored to the shape of one specific individual. This makes it a buyer’s market. It’s an ironclad law of economics: high supply plus low demand equals low prices.

As soon as I stumbled across the eBay listing for this suit, I knew I was in business. Per the title, the brand is Southwick, a classic American tailoring manufacturer. This alone didn’t make it notable: Southwick is still around these days in a diminished state, churning out lesser versions of the goods it made its name on a hundred years ago.

According to the jacket tag, however, the suit was sold by “The Ascot Shop,” which a little bit of Googling revealed is a classic menswear boutique founded in 1950 in La Jolla, California. The Ascot Shop is still standing today, but they seem to cater primarily to the beach dad business casual crowd. According to their web store, they don’t even stock Southwick. These facts, combined with the style of the jacket—three-roll-two, subtle chalk stripe pattern, healthy length—made it plain the suit was several decades old. If I had to guess, I would date it to sometime between 1988 and 1992, the tail-end of the Gordon Gekko era.

This, to me, is what made it worth copping: they just don’t make ‘em like they used to.

I’m so glad I did. After a bit of work from my tailor, the suit fits (almost) perfectly. The sleeves are plenty wide, the pants break perfectly, and the jacket rest easily across my shoulders: close enough to avoid the dreaded collar gap, but no closer. I could certainly use a little more room in the thigh (mine are quite wide thanks to years of biking), but that’s the kind of compromise you accept with the $80 suit.

While I’m thrilled with the quality/cost ratio, I’m even more pleased with the mindset it allows. Spending so little on a suit allows me to wear it freely, in any context I like. It’s not something to be guarded and fussed over, reserved for the rarest of occasions. I can wear it anytime I like. I can put some miles on it, which will more than make up for any spills or scuffs or imperfections I might attract. Clothes look best when they looks like they’ve been worn.

I completed the look with a few pieces matched the general Wall Street vibe: Tag Heuer sport watch passed down to me by my father, vintage Armani tie (~$5 on eBay), white OCBD. If I were going full Gekko mode, I would’ve swapped the shirt out for a spread collar, but to be honest, I find them distasteful and a bit cocky. Give me the rumpled, quiet charm of a button down collar any day. The more wrinkled the better; this shirt wasn’t even ironed.

Down below, I threw on my Paraboot Michaels, which are finally beginning to break in after about a year. Paraboots are pricey, but they’re built to last a lifetime. With the rest of the ensemble coming so cheap, it felt appropriate to go loud with the shoes. The moc toe and thick rubber sole play against the more elegant footwear you would typically pair with this look, like a loafer. Eye-catching, but not kitschy.

To be sure, this isn’t the be-all end-all of suits. The lapels are a bit flat, robbing the jacket of some the dimensionality you want for in a suit. The stripes on the pocket flaps don’t line up perfectly with the stripes on the body, and the sleeves are maybe a touch short. That’s ok: details like these will only be noticed by the most depraved menswear nerds.

When you’re sitting in a dark restaurant with your sweetie baby by your side, you’ll look plenty fine, and you’ll feel even better.

I am a man torn between worlds.

On the one hand: certain podcast co-hosts of mine, whose opinions I respect a great deal, who detest Taylor Swift’s latest record. This seems to be the prevailing opinion all across my X (The Everything App) timeline, most of which is composed of music critics, politics obsessives, and general take-slingers: that The Life of a Showgirl is laughably bad, loaded with corny lines, pseudo-serious self-mythology, and a particularly baffling ode to the penis of one Travis Michael Kelce.

On the other hand: my wife, and my sister (age 30), and my other sister (age 14), and the untold millions of Taylor Swift fans the world over. To them, Showgirl is more than a record—it is an event. It is music that will accompany them throughout the next several years, if not longer; music that will etch itself into their memories through sheer repetition, becoming the soundtrack to whatever phase of their existence, good or bad, they happen to be living through.

In that way, it’s similar to my relationship with the work of Bob Dylan. Through his art, he has transformed my reality, made me into a wholly different being than I would have otherwise been. I will follow him anywhere—even through five LPs of American songbook covers and an 18 minute song about the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Especially through an 18 minute song about the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

I’m not, apparently, the only one to draw this comparison. My friend Ray Padgett clocked a little chatter about Bob/Taylor comparisons in the comments of Stereogum’s write-up of Showgirl:

Per user “Goner,” Showgirl is Taylor Swift’s New Morning, a record “thousands of miles away from… the peaks of her career.” I understand the general thrust of the claim: Showgirl seems to be a consciously low-stakes effort, something to be enjoyed rather than studied.

Still, New Morning doesn’t seem like quite the right comp. That record was released just a few years after Bob’s legendary mid-sixties run—less time than it took Swift to go from the Folklore/Evermore double-shot (clearly not the high point of her career) to this latest release. New Morning was also received as something of a return to form at the time, a pleasant half-step toward audience expectations after the exasperating Self Portrait. Certainly, there would have been displeased listeners, but it’s difficult to imagine “If Not For You” or “Day of the Locusts” conjuring the same amount of vitriol as some of these latest Swift songs.

To me, the more appropriate comparison in Bob’s catalog lies further down the line: 1985’s Empire Burlesque. That record arrived a decade after Blood on the Tracks, about the same amount of time between Showgirl and 1989, Swift’s last universally-beloved release. Like Empire, Showgirl’s cover features its author in an uncomfortable pose, clad in an unconvincing costume bearing little relation to the music within. Both records were also released a year into the second term of unprecedentedly brutal right-wing austerity regimes headed by senescent entertainment industry veterans—but that’s another conversation.

The strongest similarity between Showgirl and Empire is in the writing. Swift is being pilloried for any number of lines on the new album, none moreso than the first verse of “Eldest Daughter:”

Everybody’s so punk on the internet

Everyone’s unbothered ‘til they’re not

Every joke’s just trolling and memes

Sad as it seems, apathy is hot

Everybody’s cutthroat in the comments

Every single hot take is cold as ice

When you found me, I said I was busy

That was a lie

This is, admittedly, awful. The lines about Travis Kelce’s member, complete with nonsensical reference to the podcast he hosts with his orc brother, aren’t much better:

And baby, I’ll admit, I’ve been a little superstitious

The curse on me was broken by your magic wand

Seems to be that you and me, we make our own luck

New Heights of manhood

I ain’t gotta knock on wood

“You will wind up peeking through her keyhole/Down upon your knees,” this is not.

But neither is the language on Empire:

He was a clean-cut kid

But they made a killer out of him

That’s what they did

He bought the American dream but it put him in debt

The only game he could play was Russian roulette

He drank Coca-Cola, he was eating Wonder Bread

Ate Burger Kings, he was well fed

At the time of its release, songs like “Clean Cut Kid” made Empire Burlesque an easy target. There’s something almost indecent about it, hearing the man behind “Blowin’ In The Wind” whinging on about Burger Kings.

Today, however, this daffy bullshit is what makes the record so enjoyable. It is a snapshot of a diminished Bob Dylan, an artifact of his “How Do You Do Fellow Kids?” era. For listeners coming to the material decades down the line—listeners like me—that makes it all the more thrilling. It is a chapter in the story of the most extraordinary mind of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, as essential as The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan or Highway 61 Revisited or “Love And Theft.” It is part of the process.

To be sure, I don’t consider Swift and Bob to be artists of the same caliber (I’m not sure “artist” is even the right term for her). But I can’t deny that many, many people do. Her cultural footprint is massive; she means the world and more to millions (billions?). I can already imagine some Jokermen equivalent thirty years from now that delights in Swift’s missteps and moments of weakness the same way Evan and I relish every Bob oddity, from the Live Aid appearance to “TV Talkin’ Song” to whatever the hell this is:

My journey with Bob has given me a different perspective on icons like Swift. I’m compelled to defend her decision to release distasteful, critically-reviled music, even as I acknowledge that said music is not particularly good. After all, Empire Burlesque, Knocked Out Loaded, and Down In The Groove eventually got us to Tempest and Rough & Rowdy Ways. Who’s to say Swift won’t make the same journey? It isn’t likely, but neither was it for Bob.

Another Boomer icon is an even better comparison for Swift, someone with whom her attitude, popularity, and general ~vibe~ align uncannily well: Billy Joel. Both outsiders who broke in to the industry from peripheral genres, both massively successful, both deeply self-conscious.

Like Swift is today, Joel was loathed by the tastemakers of his era. The music he made didn’t fit neatly into the rock paradigm favored by Rolling Stone, Creem, and Robert Christgau, and it was routinely written off as inconsequential, pap, a triviality. Even as he ascended to the absolute apex of fame and fortune, critical appreciation eluded him. The Stranger, his breakout 1977 masterpiece, didn’t even scrape the bottom of The Village Voice’s Pazz & Jop critical survey. He was the Rodney Dangerfield of pop: he couldn’t get no respect.

Frustrated with this reality, Joel made a play for critical acclaim in the early eighties, first with the new wave-influenced Glass Houses, then the self-serious The Nylon Curtain. Both records sold well, but critics hardly took notice. When they did, it was to Joel’s detriment: in a brutal takedown of Glass Houses for Rolling Stone, Paul Nelson claimed he came off like “a particularly obnoxious frat boy who’s hoisted a few too many while trying to put the make on an airline stewardess.” For Joel, it was a losing battle from the start.

Shortly thereafter, he wised up, shifted his focus to pleasing crowds and bedding supermodels. Both of these passions were synthesized on 1983’s international sensation An Innocent Man, which yielded three Billboard Top 10 singles, plus another all-timer in “The Longest Time.” Critics were kind enough to the album, but none mistook it for anything more than it was. Christgau summed up the general sentiment in the first sentence of his capsule review: “His art album having gone platinum and failed to clear bottom line, Joel comes at his poor neglected generation direct, peddling a nostalgia no one will mistake for philosophy.”

This is the key difference between Swift and Joel. No one ever mistook him for anything other than what he was: an entertainer. She, on the other hand, is everything: tortured poet, political activist—hell, even a philosopher.

Unlike Joel, Swift operates in the era of the poptimist, when the most commercially-successful music is also evaluated according to the rubric of high art. Over the past decade, poptimism has provided an important counter-narrative in music criticism, rightfully widening the aperture of artistic legitimacy beyond white guys with guitars. With The Life of a Showgirl, however, we seem to have reached the limits of what this lens can offer.

Poptimism only works when there’s something worth critiquing. Showgirl poses a new and novel question to those who practice it: what if pop music was just pop music? What if was neither good, nor challenging, nor unexpected? What if there wasn’t anything to say about it at all?

The answer, it seems, is just to say anything. The incentives of the attention economy and an unquenchable thirst for “impressions” drive media outlets to make editorial decisions based on what generates clicks, likes, and RTs. Whether what is being said is even worth saying isn’t part of the equation. The Taylor Swift album backlash is a prepackaged part of the Taylor Swift album cycle. It’s a load-bearing part of the take economy at this point. People’s livelihoods depend on this content, so the content must flow.

This is the consequence of the poptimist’s victory: a whole bunch of chatter that all adds up to nothing. Even if you believe that some of Taylor Swift’s music is meant to be taken as seriously as the work of someone like Bob Dylan (a questionable claim, to say the least), it’s clear on its face that this music isn’t. The Life of a Showgirl is meaningless, mindless pop music: nothing more, nothing less. No one should mistake it for anything else.

Here I suppose it’s worth noting that I’ve listened to the album exactly one time—in the car with my wife, driving to and from Costco on Friday night. It sounds perfectly fine: the buoyant synthesizers of 1989 and Lover, a few trap-lite beats, some turn-of-the-millennium pop punk power chords thrown in for the hell of it. I don’t really have any more to say about it beyond that. It isn’t music worth saying more about. The epic takedowns and the rapturous write-ups are all equally absurd.

This isn’t a call to “let people enjoy things” so much as a plea that we recognize there are other, better things toward which to apply our limited mental and emotional bandwidth. Just as restaurant critics have no business reviewing the latest addition to the Taco Bell menu, music critics ought not concern themselves with the latest missive from a billionaire egomaniac engaged to the dumbest man on the planet.

We—as readers and writers both—can just say no.

Fall is here, finally.

Short days of grey skies mean I’ll finally get to bust out the jackets and trousers I’ve been longing to wear since February. Along with the cooler weather comes another benefit, at least here in the greater Bay Area: concerts. September, October, and November are always densely packed with great gigs. This year is no exception.

A few weeks ago, I realized I had a major run coming up—four shows in five nights, with the motion picture event of the year wedged in there for good measure. What follows is a running diary of these events and associated thoughts, feelings, and photographs.

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Tuesday, September 23rd

I drove out to Berkeley to catch Blake Mills and Pino Palladino.

A few weeks ago, Blake and Pino dropped That Wasn’t a Dream, the follow up to 2021’s Notes With Attachments. Both records are spacey, technically spectacular instrumental(ish) jazz(ish) odysseys. I’m much more familiar with Blake’s work as a rock artist—the guitar solo on “Skeleton Is Walking” remains undefeated—and producer of other rock artists, but I’ve been digging this side of him (almost) just as much.

Dream is smooth, creamy, rhythmic, playful. It’s also digestible, a seven song set that clocks in somewhere south of 38 minutes. It’s been a great accompaniment on nocturnal BART rides, transiting into and out of Bay Area bedrock. Consider this a full-throated recommendation to any skeptical rockists out there.

The show was at some place called The Freight, which I’d never been to before. Turns out it’s a jazz club a block off the main Shattuck/University drag—not the kind of place I typically find myself. Still, it was a great room: small, fully seated, tons of space above your head for sounds to bounce around and blend into something strange rangy. The sold-out crowd was rapt and respectful, a pleasant change of pace from the typical chattering set you find at rock gigs.

The set was viscous and iridescent and warm. Everyone was operating at peak performance, fully locked into their own world while simultaneously in tune with everything else happening around them. The guy next to me actually laughed out loud a few times, typically at a particularly nimble bit of percussion from drummer Chris Dave. Very vibes, particularly with the stubborn heat still lingering in the air long after dusk; this just so happened to be the hottest day of the year for the Bay.

After the crowd cleared out, Blake and I shot the shit for a bit. He came through on Never Ending Stories last month to rap with me about the brilliant Cass McCombs, but it was great to meet IRL—as much as I love podcasting, you can’t beat a handshake. He’d been wearing a Hejira cap when we spoke previously, and I mentioned how much sense that made after seeing him go full Jaco Pastorius on the fretless bass. Turns out Blake’s got some of the type of gear Pastorius used to use, which he puts to good use in his performances with Joni Mitchell. Small world.

Wednesday, September 24th

I went downtown to catch Destroyer at August Hall.

I’ve been attending Dan Bejar shows religiously for nearly two decades. He’s one of the few artists I still consider “can’t miss,” even when he’s playing in smaller, stripped down configurations. This is how I saw him the two most recent times: as a duo in early 2024, and as a trio opening for Father John Misty earlier this year. These are quiet, compelling performances, full of catalog cuts from ten, fifteen, twenty years ago—Bejar can command a room with nothing more than his voice and his hair.

The real treat, however, is the full band experience, when Dan “goes electric.” Every time I catch one of these shows, I’m convinced it’s the best I’ve ever seen. Unfortunately, they only happen so often, typically during album cycles: it’s expensive to transform your one-man art rock project into a seven-piece colossus.

Fortunately, this year’s an album cycle. In March, Bejar released Dan’s Boogie, the fourteenth Destroyer record. It is, as always, excellent, full of tangled knots of language and undeniable melodies and rich, dense arrangements, all guitars and gleaming synthesizers and reverberating horns. It’s music made to be played by the big band. The numbers just have to pencil out.

A sense of precarity hovered over the journey there, the undeniable feeling that mechanisms which once worked were beginning to fail. I got off BART at Powell, across from the San Francisco Center, an enormous mall on Market that has collapsed into near-total vacancy over the past several years. The streets were dim and empty and full of unsettling heat—less than the day before, but still very much present.

August Hall is in an odd part of town, right in the thick of “classic San Francisco.” It’s gorgeous territory, certainly, full of old-growth office buildings and dark little dives, but it tends to empty out once the sun goes down and the professionals flee back to North Beach, the Richmond, and the Rockridge/Temescal corridor. I queued up outside alongside my fellow thirty- (and forty-, and fifty-) something men, made my way through a maze of low ceilings and staircases into the main room. Someone’s put plenty of capital into August Hall, but it remains somewhat antiseptic, vaguely off-putting for reasons I can’t quite explain.

Jennifer Castle opened the show. She’s got a knockout voice, but it was hard for her to reach the entire room without a band. Surely, economic constraints are in mind on this tour, which will wend its way south, then east, then north, then east again, then north further still, all the way to Montreal, then south down the Eastern Seaboard, then west and north and west and north, like stairsteps across the middle of the country, before finally finding its way back to Vancouver, where Bejar lives. It’s an odd, curlicue route—Milwaukee to Minneapolis to Cleveland?—but apparently efficient enough. There only seems to be one bus, but one is certainly better than none.

All these concerns were forgotten the instant the band took the stage. Destroyer live is many things, but it is one thing above all else: LOUD. “The Same Thing As Nothing At All” exploded like a bomb, blowing the crowd back from the stage. You could feel it deep down in your gut: physical, involuntary, wholly satisfying. This is what rock songs should sound like.

From there, the band was off to the races, banger after banger after banger—pure gas, all night. The Dan’s Boogie material sounded incredible: pummeling at times (“Hydroplaning Off The Edge of the World”), lush at others (“Cataract Time”), always ear-splitting. Bejar managed to thread a delicate needle in selecting songs, spotlighting new tunes while also effectively playing his greatest hits. Dig this setlist:

The Kaputt material in particular was a revelation. I don’t listen to album too frequently these days—I must have heard each song a thousand times by now—but when the sequencer whirled to life and the guitars swooned and the band launched into the title track, I felt myself melt. Everyone around me seemed to feel the same way. All sounds like a dream, indeed.

Bejar is one of the great frontmen of the 21st century. He’s aware of the part he’s there to play and he plays it perfectly every time out, flouncing around the stage in a positively torched OCBD. The drama comes from his contrast with the band: the laissez-faire frontman and his murderer’s row of musicians. He’s fully aware of the power of the sound behind him, but he’s plays it like its expected, entirely de rigueur, crouching down at the foot of the stage to sweep his mane back, swig some wine, maybe crack the slightest of grins. He knows exactly what he’s doing.

We got a double shot of Destroyer classics for the encore, “Looters’ Follies” and “Chinatown,” and then it was over, far too soon. I’ll see them again in two years time, hopefully.

Thursday, September 25th

Back out to Berkeley for Big Thief.

I’m sorry to say this was the first time I’d ever seen them. I was a Big Thief agnostic until the undeniable Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You. Their latest record, Double Infinity, is even better—“the unmistakeable work of a band with nothing left to prove.” I seem to be on my own in thinking that, at least among music critics, most of whom agree that the record is a step back, and perhaps the first indication of an oncoming decline. And that’s just fine: more good music for me.

I met my friend Jordan down in town to grab a slice of pizza before the show. The heat of the last couple days had finally dissipated, and the streets were packed with undergrads and DoorDashers and skateboarders. People seemed to be responding to the change in weather, moving faster to catch up on everything they had failed to accomplish on scorching eighty-degree days.

We made it into the Greek Theatre just as the openers kicked off their last song. The place was already packed, so we trudged up to the terraced lawn above the amphitheater to settle in at the very top. This crowd was everything the Destroyer crowd was not: young, chatty, mostly female. Going in, I didn’t have a firm picture of the typical Big Thief fan, but it immediately became clear that the band resonates most with earnest, yearning Zoomers. Whatever anyone may think of the latest record, the fact that they can summon tens of thousands of twenty year-olds for a night of live rock music is an achievement.

And it’s very good rock music. The set was relatively short, focused primarily on material from the new record. Double Infinity is a busy, buzzy record, full of zithers and tape loops and laughter. The strength of the songs lies in their messiness, the overwhelming wave of sound produced collectively by six, eight, ten people packed tight into a little studio. It’s not something that necessarily translates to the stage, especially when Big Thief remains so defiantly simple: four players, zero video screens, everything played live.

This arrangement means they’ve had to reinvent these new songs already. In most cases, they work great. “Los Angeles” already sounded like a live classic, rousing and catchy and effortlessly romantic. “No Fear,” one of the haziest songs on the record, was refashioned into something much heavier, built around sledgehammer chords from Buck Meek. Some songs were still a work in progress. “Incomprehensible” was a bit thin, in need of something to compensate for all the missing studio clatter, and I found myself missing Laraaji’s huge vocals on “Grandmother”—but hey, that’s a tough one to fake.

I never caught Big Thief with Max Oleartchik, but it’s clear that new bassist Joshua Crumbly fits right in. In our recent conversation with Buck on Jokermen, he spoke glowingly of Crumbly’s talent and presence. After seeing them perform, it’s clear why. Crumbly offered a steady foundation throughout the night, even as certain songs wobbled. Judging by the huge cheers it elicited, his mondo bass solo on “Words” may have been the highlight of the night.

There were a couple speedbumps at certain points. Adrianne Lenker in particular seemed to be in a strange place, like she had things she wanted to say but not the words with which to say them. It was difficult to tell what was going on from way up high, but according to firsthand reports, there was some strange energy in the crowd. Still, the band powered through. By the time they wrapped on “Spud Infinity,” the whole bowl was fully on their side, singing along to every word.

For now, it seems that Big Thief is in state of becoming. They’re figuring out how to be a band again, how to stand on three legs instead of four. It isn’t always successful, but it’s thrilling nonetheless. The best shows are those in which anything can happen. Sometimes, necessarily, that means a mistake, a miss, a flub. That’s alright. You take the bad with the good—especially when there’s so much of the latter.

Friday, September 26th

A refreshing night off from shows, which meant I could catch One Battle After Another.

I went down to the Metreon to catch a 70mm IMAX screening with my men-only book club, which exists as a valiant defense against a) the male loneliness epidemic, and b) the “men don’t read fiction” narrative. In preparation for OBAA, we just finished reading Vineland—the first Pynchon novel I’d actually managed to complete. I loved every page, from the kaleidoscopic cultural history of 20th century California to the false flag Godzilla attack to the People’s Republic of Rock & Roll to the Galaxy of Ribs to the shockingly tender final page, which brought tears to my eyes for the first time in months. I had no idea how the events of the book would translate to the screen, but I was excited to find out.

As it turns out, they weren’t. OBAA may have been “inspired” by Vineland, but it’s a mistake to consider this an adaptation of the book in any sense. I may have more to say about the film on an upcoming podcast, so I’ll reserve most of my comments until then. For now, I’ll just say that it’s another PTA masterpiece, yet it left me feeling ever-so-slightly cold—the exact opposite of what I expected. This tweet from Eric Deines sums up where I’m at currently:

That said, impeccable needle drops, as always. I don’t wanna do your dirty work no more…

Saturday, September 27th

Up to Sonoma, then out to Bolinas for Cass McCombs and associated acts at a benefit organized by esteemed NorCal promoters Folk Yeah.

Bolinas is a tiny township tucked into the southeastern tip of the Point Reyes peninsula. You drive up and into the Marin Hills, then wind down toward the coast through dense stands of redwoods and endless eucalyptus, finally emerging onto a small lagoon, the surface of which sits, threateningly, just a few feet beneath the road. Small wooden houses are arranged along unpaved roads with alphabetical, botanical names: Aspen, Birch, Cedar. Some of these homes have clearly had a lot of money pumped into them, others are on the verge of collapsing in on themselves. There appear to be precisely zero restaurants. Think Sea Ranch divided by Eureka and you’re not far off.

The show took place in, and was a benefit for, Mesa Park, a small municipal complex on the outskirts of town. Folk Yeah co-presented with Parachute Days, a micro-promoter named after the enormous parachute tent that’s set up at all their events. Anyone who’s been around long enough (me) might remember previous Parachute Days gigs at nearby Love Field, including the last couple west coast Woodsists Fests. These gigs have an extraordinarily chill vibe: blankets spread out all over, kids and dogs running higgledy-piggledy, no phone service whatsoever. It’s exactly what I’m looking for out of live music these days, the complete antithesis of corporatized festivals held in “scene”-y locales. Next time you see a Folk Yeah gig in some way off the map spot, do whatever you can to get there. It hardly even matters who’s on the bill.

Of course, it doesn’t hurt to have one of this century’s preeminent artists headlining. This was my first chance to hear some of the material from Interior Live Oak, Cass McCombs’s latest release. Live Oak is one of the year’s best records, an entire ecosystem of rock songs—“a California of the stereo,” per my review for Aquarium Drunkard. Bolinas promised to be the perfect setting to hear some of it performed.

My wife Grace and I met Jordan and his wife Madeline there around 2:30. We posted up by the booth and let the afternoon wash over us, nursing tallboys of dry cider, noshing on Asian pears that someone had left in a box on the ground, free for anyone to take. People tossed footballs and slung frisbees while performers came and went onstage, utterly unconcerned with how much attention was being paid. Time passed gradually, then suddenly, and then there was Cass.

The set was suitably stripped down, just McCombs, his bass player, and the occasional click track. He didn’t need anything more: the bones of the songs are strong enough. “Missionary Bell,” one of my favorites on the album, was a particular highlight, all chiming chords and effortless melody. New tunes like “Priestess” and “Peace” cohabited easily with classics like “Bum Bum Bum” and “Big Wheel.” Like the Destroyer set, it all added up to something greater than the sum of its parts, a simultaneous look back and look ahead. McCombs and Bejar sit together neatly as obscure, compelling lyricists who also happen to be world-class rockers. The music they make couldn’t be more dissimilar, but it all hits the same pleasure center in my brain.

The sun began to set midway through, and lights came on, and the tent transformed into something strange and dark and warm, a handcrafted spaceship marooned on a distant forest moon. Cass shifted between electric and acoustic-electric guitars while wild packs of children roamed at his feet, dancing and shouting and falling down in time to the music. For a moment, the world outside ceased to exist. This is the magic of these gigs, what makes them worth rearranging a day around.

They always end too soon. Before we knew it, we were back on the road, speeding south along Highway 1 in the dark through Stinson Beach and Muir Woods and Mill Valley, back to reality and the hum of the freeway and no music at all.

Tim and Daryn are the minds behind Patina Studies, a new menswear pop-up in San Francisco. The first installment took place at the beginning of September in a beautiful old building on Columbus Avenue. It was a great scene: discerning vendors, a wide variety of goods, tons of cool-looking people. For anyone familiar with the ~vibe~ of your average North Beach resident, this last point is a particular accomplishment.

Tim, Daryn, and I spoke a little bit at the event, but they were both plenty busy—turnout was way higher than expected. A few days later, we connected for a chat about the Bay Area’s less-than-inspiring fashion culture, the vision behind Patina Studies, and where it goes from here. What follows is an edited transcript of our conversation.

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How’d you guys meet?

Tim: I worked in politics for 20 years. When I quit, I got a clothing company going, and I’d had some stuff made by Tailors’ Keep in San Francisco. And I thought I might be able to help them out with social media and marketing, kind of doing what I did in the political world for a small brand.

I got to know Daryn and Ryan [Devens, the owner] at Tailors’ Keep. Ryan and I were actually a little bit closer in the beginning, but then when Daryn and I started working together, I was just like, “Oh, well, I love this guy.” That was the inception of whatever it is that we do together. Does that sound right to you Daryn?

Daryn: I remember it a little different—I thought you and I were better friends in the beginning. [Laughs] Ryan and I had a conversation about whether I wanted Tim on just because I was fearful of possibly ruining our friendship. But yeah, we met through Tailors’ Keep, where I’ve been now for over six years. I general manage, assist with client experience, and I do fittings as well.

Meeting Tim in the midst of Covid, when people were just coming back to being around each other again, he just stood out to me. I think we both—I mean, I won’t speak for him, but I’ve been wanting to do something with Tim for a while. So when this idea came about, it was a good opportunity for our skillsets to complement each other.

“This idea” is Patina Studies, which we’ll get to in a moment. Before we do, tell me a little bit about Tailors’ Keep.

Daryn: Tailor’s Keep is a bespoke menswear atelier here in San Francisco. It was started by Ryan Devens a little over ten years ago—we actually celebrated ten years this year.

We provide true bespoke, meaning everything’s made by hand in-house, as you see in the old Savile Row houses. Patterns are drawn by hand and cut by hand, fittings are done here in San Francisco, from the muslin fitting all the way to the finished product. We also offer a high-end made-to-measure option that maintains a majority of handwork in the construction. Having the two combined allows us to provide a semi-bespoke service, meaning all the alterations, all the adjustments. We can do more intensive things like adjust the pattern here on-site, unlike other places that might have to outsource some of that work.

In the last few years, with Tim’s assistance, we’ve really pushed Tailors’ Keep into its own lane. We work in a weird market here in San Francisco where people don’t need to dress up. Our billionaires don’t wear suits or tailoring to begin with.

They should!

Daryn: For sure. [Laughs] I mean, Mark Zuckerberg’s stylist chose to put him in oversize t-shirts and necklaces.

But y’know, after Tim came onboard, he instilled in us this concept—and I think it kinda resonates with what Patina Studies is hoping to be—of recognizing that we’re this beacon for tailored menswear. Before, we did the California thing: we were kinda passive about it, hoping that things would just somehow happen, and we’d be along for the ride, instead of realizing that we had to create the wave.

More than anything, [Patina Studies] and the other events that Tailors’ Keep has done have really affirmed that there’s a community here in the Bay Area that just wants to like, hang and nerd out and shop. There’s a narrative that still exists in the Bay Area that shopping and liking clothes is a kind of faux pas.

Tim: To Daryn’s point—from Seattle to San Diego, nobody’s doing what Tailors’ Keep is doing. On the East Coast, you have J. Mueser and Drake’s and whoever, and you just don’t have that on the West Coast. That’s the niche that Tailors’ Keep is filling.

We already talked about it a little bit, so let’s just go there all the way. Patina Studies: what is it? What’s the aim? How’d you guys decide to do this?

Tim: I lived in New York for a long time. I came up in the menswear world of the early aughts, when Michael Williams of A Continuous Lean put on pop-up fleas. I went to the first couple of those, and I was just like, “this is cool.” I got more into the menswear world through Matt Hranek and his events in the city, and Jake Mueser’s events. And I was bi-coastal, back and forth from New York to San Francisco all the time, and I would come back to San Francisco, and there just wasn’t shit happening. It was a bit of a bummer.

More recently, when Stephon [Carson] and Team Cozy Boys and all those guys started putting on Alfargo’s right after the pandemic, I was like, “man, that looks so fun—somebody should really do that in San Francisco!” And Daryn and I had been kicking around ideas, and then this just made so much sense. We had a great space, we’d built a little community of people we knew could fill it out. We just knew we could nail it.

Daryn was involved more in the punk rock, DIY side back in his day, but for me, it really came from that back and forth between New York and San Francisco, where I was kinda jealous of what all my friends in New York got to do all the time. I wanted something like that here.

Daryn: What Tim really is for me, other than a great friend, is a forcing function. Sometimes I just blurt things out to him and he’s like, “let’s just do it.” Literally, he was like, “does this weekend work?” I was like, “what’re you talking about?” And he was like, “for the thing, the pop-up.” So it was an idea before it was really even an idea.

A couple years ago, I went to New York to help Tim out at a pop-up that Sprezza put on. It was my first experience at a menswear event like that in New York, and I was so blown away by the community. People showed up just to say what’s up to Tim—some people for like five or ten minutes. All they wanted to do was just say hi. Whether or not they bought something from Tim, I mean yeah, that would’ve been nice…

Tim: [Laughs]

Daryn: But even hanging out in the stairwell, and one of the owners of 3sixteen comes in because they were right around the corner, and he just wants to say what’s up to some of his friends—in San Francisco, that doesn’t even occur…

So, to Tim’s point, it was like, will people show up for this? That day, when we realized there were people waiting outside for this thing that’s never happened before, and the excitement was already percolating, it was pretty intense for me. It’s deeply humbling that people are even asking for another one.

Clearly, it seems like it struck a chord! How do you feel like it went?

Tim: I come from an organizing background, so with events like this, I’m very analytical about it, I have a structure. But I think Daryn’s right, this one felt really personal. I really wanted it to go well, and I know Daryn did too. I had a good feeling when Derek [Guy] and Peter [Zottolo] started promoting it that we were gonna have a good turn out. Everybody who was involved did a really great job promoting it, friends of ours promoted it. So it felt really good just to have people come.

And then the other goal obviously was for vendors to sell their stuff and have really cool stuff for people to buy that they might not see otherwise. And that was also successful. So top to bottom, there are things we’re gonna tweak and change and do differently, but I would say it was a huge success.

Daryn: I was the working doorman for the day, just because a friend of mine kind of bailed last minute, but it worked out perfectly. I was able to interact with people, and being out there and seeing really stylish people like, loiter on the sidewalk while there’s a bunch of people inside, and the music’s going, and all the stuff going on on that block—it was such an interesting thing to see, especially in North Beach, somewhere that’s hyper tourist-y. That area in the city isn’t necessarily known for being very stylish.

I think people in the Bay Area are kind of against this concept of wanting to be seen, y’know? Whereas in Los Angeles and New York, people are ok with that concept. Like, “yeah, I was at that party.” Even if you’re there for five minutes, you’re there and you’re looking cool, and then you dip out to the next thing. I felt that energy from some people coming to Patina Studies, and that’s ok with me. That shallowness is cool with me.

Leading up to that day, I was asking Tim what he expected, and he was like, “I dunno, like fifty to a hundred people.” And I was thinking, if only 50 people show up, and we’re open for six hours, that’s less than 10 people per hour. But I had my little Costco counter out there and I’d say, relatively conservatively, around 400 heads rolled through. That blew my mind.

Yeah, I came through maybe an hour or two into it and there were at least a hundred people there like, literally while I was there, to say nothing of the entire day.

Where’d the name come from?

Tim: All Daryn. I had so many bad ideas…

I thought you were the marketing man.

Tim: I know! I love naming stuff, and I was throwing out like—my friend Yolanda refers to French flea markets as brocantes. And I was like, oh, “Bro-cante?” Get it, like “bro?” And Daryn and my wife were both like, “I dunno dude, that’s pretty bad.”

I don’t know how he came on Patina Studies, but when he did it just landed perfectly.

Daryn: Yeah, I was very anti “Bro-cante.” [Laughs] I think a lot of what Tim was feeling—and I felt too—is this notion of “let’s name it something not in English, and that makes it sound more elegant.” But I don’t think either of us are that elegant to begin with, so it’s not representative of who we are.

For me, a lot of it stemmed from like, ok: things that patina, they age. That’s the intent, right? You want it to age in a lot of instances. A lot of people forget that. Clothing, watches, cars are meant to be used. It’s ok if they age, and in fact, if they age well, that’s a good thing. That’s your value proposition: I’m gonna spend $10,000 on this Rolex, and it’s gonna 1) appreciate in value, but also 2) look cooler over time. Same with raw denim. Very basic, 101: the more you wear it, the more you’re actually wearing it. No need to use all the laser technology to cut to [pre-distress it and] cut to the chase, because there’s no story behind it. That’s where “studies” comes from.

Another reason we chose these specific [vendors] is because they themselves commissioned the clothing, in most instances, that they sold that day. It’s not like a professional vintage seller, where they go to these warehouses and they pick and dig through…

Tim: Well, we had both.

Daryn: We had both, but [the vendors] still chose what their inventory was, and I thought that would be more special. Like Tim, what was that suit you had? The pinstripe suit?

Tim: Yeah, the Ralph Lauren.

Daryn: Yeah, that’s a great story. He went to Crowley in Dumbo originally, and he saw the suit, but it wasn’t his size. And then he found the same suit on eBay in a size he thought would fit. It ended up being a 44L, so it didn’t fit, and there was no way to make it fit, so now someone else can enjoy it.

Tim: The name, the “Patina Studies” thing, it’s a good indicator of Daryn and I’s relationship. We both give each other permission to go with an idea, but we’re also pretty good at saying no to each other.

“Bro-cante?”

Tim: Yeah, exactly. [Laughs] Like, it wasn’t a good name. And so him being like, “no dude,” but also me saying yes to Patina Studies—that was the whole thing time and time again. It just worked really quickly.

Even finding Wes [Robinson], who did the art, that was a no-brainer. I was just like, “this guy’s gonna do the art,” and Daryn was like, “yep, I trust you.”

Match made in heaven. Was the Ralph suit you were talking about—was it that brown one with the pinstripes?

Tim: Yeah.

I saw that. That was so tight, man.

Tim: If you go through Sean Crowley’s Instagram, he has it styled out. I think it’s one of the best styling’s he’s ever done. So I got obsessed with that suit, and I tried to find it. And then I found it, and it was marked in my size, and it got here, and it’s just… it’s made for somebody who’s not 5’8”. And I am definitely 5’8”.

I think about ten different people tried it on and it didn’t quite fit anybody. My Cinderella’s still out there.

That’s why you gotta keep doing these. On that note, it seems like something you guys want to keep coming back to and building on. Where do you see this going?

Tim: We’re definitely gonna do another one before Christmas. We’re really excited about it. I don’t think we have any hard plans yet about what it’ll look like, whether it’ll be in the same place or someplace new, but yeah, I’m feeling very much like another one. Maybe the week after Thanksgiving. I know Daryn’s on the same page.

We want to build it, we want to grow it, but we want to be intentional. We’re not trying to be West Coast Craft. Having curation and intentionality behind all of it is what makes it special. In a world where you have ChatGPT and [automated] everything else, people’s personal edit and personal curation really matter. I trust my taste, I trust Daryn’s taste, and what I really trust is both of us bouncing shit off each other.

I think that’s the plan going forward: keep it edited, keep it curated, keep it cool.

Daryn: One other thing too—not to keep harping on “Bro-cante”—

Tim: [Laughs]

Daryn: But I didn’t want to be so literal about what the thing was, right? I told Tim like, “I wanna leave space for something that might not be a pop-up at some point.” I want it to age—pun intended—I want it to patina well. We’re not super young men anymore. If I was in my twenties, I could probably be doing pop-ups for the next decade. But one of the intentions with the name was to see how else we can organically grow into other things. It’s more of an umbrella name for us.

The next pop-up will definitely be sooner rather than later. But we’re also trying not get overhyped. There’s a lot of people in our circle that are super excited for us and want to give us ideas. Some are great, some are not so great… [Laughs] But you mentioned it Ian—like, the idea resonated with people. And I had pretty low expectations for that, y’know? To see the diverse group of people that came out was really empowering for me.

But again, it’s a “don’t get too big for your britches” situation.

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On January 6th, 2021, a mob of right wing reactionaries stormed the U.S. Capitol hoping, somehow, to overturn the results of the 2020 election and reinstall Donald Trump as president of the United States, against the will of the American people. That their mission was doomed from the start did not matter. It was a prime opportunity to cause ruckus, to exact some degree of vengeance on a government that clearly loathed them, if it acknowledged them at all. Any potential consequences would be paid later.

And they were. Over the ensuing four years, the doddering Biden administration pursued two goals above all else: aiding and abetting genocide, and prosecuting the many sundry oafs who had participated in January 6th. The Department of Justice, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and various other arms of the federal government devoted considerable resources to identifying, trying, and imprisoning anyone deemed an “insurrectionist.” They had a message to send: actions had consequences.

Until they didn’t. Soon after his re-ascension to the presidency in January 2025, Donald Trump granted a universal pardon to anyone convicted of any crime related to the January 6th riots. This pardon extended even to those with records of other criminal offenses, including child abuse, domestic violence, and rape. He too had a message to send: for some, actions did not have consequences. These patriots were free to resume the lives they had left behind on January 5th.

Ariel Pink is hoping to do the same. Last week, he released With You Every Night, his first proper LP since his participation in the January 6th rally (though not the riot). Since then, Pink has become a pariah in the indie rock world. He was dropped by his label, his music was delisted from streaming platforms, and his tours were canceled. Friends and collaborators distanced themselves, disavowed any and all relationships. Actions, for Pink, continued to have consequences.

Faced with this reality, Pink financed the recording and release of With You Every Night entirely on his own. Surely, the album will not win him many new fans. Most of the songs here work in the same register as 2012’s Mature Themes: bright, corny synthesizers; absurdo-schlock lyrics; melodies straight out of public access television credit sequences. These are not the preferred tones and textures of the MAGA set, many of whom would presumably call this music “gay,” if they ever hear it at all (they won’t).

At the same time, it’s unlikely this album will win him back any old fans—not because of the music itself, but because of everything else. Over the past several years, Pink has refashioned himself into an anti-cancel culture crusader, a cautionary tale of the limits of free speech and the soft power wielded by liberal tastemakers. In interviews with journalistic luminaries such as Tucker Carlson, Roseanne Barr, and Adam Friedland, Pink has railed against the supposed conformity of those in the music world, and the unjust treatment he has received due to his heterodox beliefs. This campaign has only alienated him further from former listeners.

With You Every Night, then, seems to be a record made for no one. This tension is what makes it an inherently interesting object, one worth engaging with in good faith. Say what you will about Pink’s behavior and beliefs, but this clearly isn’t an attempt to cash in on his status as a MAGA cause célèbre. It’s music made for himself, music he couldn’t help but make—a genuine, sincere artistic effort.

It’s also, frankly, pretty good. With its symphony of synthesizers and tinny drum machine beat, “Pocket Full of Promises” opens the album with a flashback to “Kinski Assassin,” the bonkers banger that kicks off Mature Themes. Lines about Qanon and “out of whack” politics (“You fell for that / That’s what we both love about me”) might come off as cringe had Pink not already established a reputation as poet laureate of the dumpster. Many of his best songs are made up of literal garbage language—words that mostly aren’t even meant to be heard, much less mean anything. In this context, these asides work perfectly fine, sudden ejaculations discarded just as fast as they arrive.

The stronger moments here find Pink playing pastiche and delivering his schizo gabble in equal measure. “Mommy Made Dinner,” a goth ditty that could pass for Seventeen Seconds-era Cure, fixates on the juxtaposition of “hunk[s] of meat” and “soggy doggy treats.” The Byrds-biting “House of the Haunted Hebrews” (great title) is built around a jangling, McGuinn-ian guitar, while “Doggie In The Window” rides a mondo organ styled after Ray Manzarek’s sound on an early Doors record. Musically speaking, these songs are uniformly excellent; Pink is as much of a student of rock history as ever. The extent to which you’ll find them enjoyable depends on how charming you find his schtick at this point. I’ll confess: I still do.

At times, the album approaches the rarified air of the Haunted Graffiti era. “Nightbirds” is a perfect track two, a sugar-sweet boogie that ranks right up there with “Among Dreams” and “Every Night I Die at Miyagi’s.” Lead single “Everyone’s Wrong” is even better. Over a gauzy, maudlin melody swiped from “The Girl From Ipanema,” Pink stews on the mistakes he’s made: “Times like these I get depressed and I feel so sad / I think that I’m fucking wrong.” He isn’t the only one at fault, however: “If I’m wrong it’s for the best and I feel so sad / ‘Cuz everyone’s fucking wrong.” It’s raw, tender, real—a rare moment of honesty from the Clown Prince of Indie Pop.

Musically, the song picks up where Pink left off with “Another Weekend,” the divine, downer pinnacle of his last proper LP, 2017’s Dedicated To Bobby Jameson. That record, released in the first year of Trump 1.0, was underappreciated, dismissed as an overripe relic of a scene that had crested sometime around the 2010 midterms, the red wave that swept dozens of foaming, feral madmen out of lawnmower dealerships, rifle ranges, and VA hospital PTSD wards into the halls of power. With You Every Night arrives in the first year of Trump 2.0. It is, to say the least, a different world, one of drudgery, and despair, and constant catastrophe. Each day brings some awful new assault on a pillar of our society, from Gestapo immigration enforcement, to the rollback of life-saving vaccine mandates, to the complete abrogation of the right to speak freely. After just eight months, it’s already clear that is the most horrific administration of my lifetime (up until today, at least).

It’s also the most effective. Within all the mendacity and malignancy is the slightest silver lining: a vision of a muscular (some might say “authoritarian”) executive branch that has the capacity to bend reality to its will. The second Trump regime is an utter repudiation of the last several generations of Democratic governance, from the smug triangulation of Clinton, to the meek incrementalism of Obama, to the Weekend at Bernie’s fever dream of Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. These administrations were adamant that the world had been made and there was no remaking it—that the most they could do was manage decline by baling water out of the sinking ship of state.

Even at the time, this was a questionable vision. Trump 2 has proven it decisively false. Reality is fungible, even flexible. It can be broken. This administration is well aware of that fact, and it has committed to applying its considerable strength towards the cruelest of intentions. Whenever this is all over—and it will eventually be over, one way or another—we must ensure these hard-earned lessons are not forgotten. The world is what we make of it. We have the capacity to impose our values upon it. After three more years (or seven? eleven?) of this shit, it will not only be our right to do so, it will be an imperative. Liberals might be loathe to admit this reality, but it does not make it any less true.

In the meantime, Pink and his fellow patriots are, presumably, pleased as punch. They may have lost the battle, but they won the war, and we are all worse off for it, Pink very much included. In the indie rock sphere, With You Every Night is effectively invisible. Most songs on the album have topped out around 30,000 streams on Spotify, a fraction of a fraction of the numbers Pink once did. Legacy music media seems to have enacted a sort of omertà as it regards the album: no news hits, no press releases—no hint that it exists, much less is pretty good. No one has even bothered to pan him: per aggregator Album of The Year, the album has received precisely zero formal reviews. It simply isn’t worth it. There’s no juice to squeeze from this lemon.

It’s a shame. After the waking nightmare of the last half-decade, the cancellation of Ariel Pink for the relatively benign crime of attending January 6th feels more absurd than ever. It’s worth noting that Pink’s pal John Maus faced hardly any blowback for his attendance, a fact that Pink harped on in a recent Substack missive (Maus, of course, was smart enough not to try the martyr routine on Fox News). In a world of such extraordinary crises, who has the emotional bandwidth to invest themselves in the personal politics of one weird little dude? Certainly not me.

But I am not the world. Many people believed, and evidently still do, that Pink’s actions were beyond the pale—that they fully invalidated any and all merit he ever held as an artist. As much as I might disagree with this belief, I cannot deny that thousands upon thousands of people maintain it, especially those who make made up the bulk of Pink’s audience: former Pitchfork obsessives who have aged into milquetoast listeners of The Daily. If I’m aware of this fact, Pink should have been too.

Ours would be a better world if such attitudes did not prevail, if the strange and objectionable beliefs of great artists could be forgiven, if not forgotten. Then again, it would be an even greater world if the cruelty, xenophobia, and nihilism that drive the MAGA movement did not exist. Wishing it away will get us nowhere. As distasteful as it may be, learning to live with it—all of it—is the only thing we can do. Pink must do the same. With With You Every Night, a record doomed to be ignored by all but the Haunted Graffiti Mujahideen, it appears he has.

Ariel Pink stood up for the awful things he believes. His audience stood up for their beliefs as well, and now both are worse off. Those who choose not to listen to the new album will be missing out on a worthy follow up to Mature Themes, Pom Pom, and Bobby Jameson. It’s their loss, certainly, though not a particularly tragic one. Plenty of great records have dropped this year, with more on the way. Spotify queues will continue to fill up just fine.

For Pink, the loss is much greater. He may have won himself a few new admirers in the Tucker Carlson audience, but it’s unlikely that they’ll be smashing play on “I Wanna Be a Girl” (great song). Those who would are long gone—not so much offended at this point as unbothered, utterly disinterested, the Dons Draper to Pink’s Ginsberg.

There is no clemency in the court of public opinion, no presidential pardon forthcoming that might unwind mistakes made. For Ariel Pink, there is no Before Today. There is only tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow.

“With You Every Night” is available now

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Today I’m pulling a double shot: one post, two looks. Talk about bang for your buck.

I wore this on the evening of Thursday, September 4th.

That night, I went out to Fabulosa Books in the Castro for the launch of the latest issue of the Radicchio Salad zine, “Gay Summer.” For those unaware, Radicchio Salad is my dear friend Ori’s burgeoning conceptual food media empire, the ~vibe~ of which exists somewhere around the intersection of Bon Appétit, Pee-wee’s Playhouse, and Butt Magazine. This was the fifth installment of the zine, but the first to be published in physical form (I contributed a brief write up of Bob Dylan albums and their equivalent mustards to the first issue). As such, it called for a physical celebration.

This is one of the great pleasures of attending events: putting together a little outfit, or, to use a slightly more affected term, “getting a fit off.” Beyond just showing up, putting some effort into your presentation is the best way to signal that you care.

It also, in a mild but measurable way, makes an impact on the world around you. We all deserve to encounter a bit of beauty in our day-to-day lives. Living in San Francisco, I get more than most, but it’s no thanks to the average ensemble you might find on a man lingering outside the Verve at the corner of Church and Market: Allbirds, “performance” fabric, slim-fit silhouette straight of the Obama era. I don’t need these guys to dress like me (I wouldn’t want them to), but I would prefer that they apply some small amount of thought toward the way they make themselves up each day. A beautiful city deserves to be populated by a beautiful people—or at the very least, an inoffensive-looking people.

The headline piece here is the sweater, which I copped from O’Connell’s last month in anticipation of autumn. I’ve had my eye on their range of knitwear for a year or two, and I finally made up my mind to pull the trigger on this piece. It’s handknit in Scotland and made of 100% merino wool.

The color is a handsome charcoal-brown melange (they call it “mink”) studded here and there with pops of white. The wool is plenty heavy, good for rambling through fog and damp, but it’s a relatively open weave, which makes it surprisingly breathable. It was probably a bit too heavy for this particular evening—September is peak San Francisco summer—but I was still able to get away with it.

I had a hard time figuring out what size to order. The sweaters are sold according to chest size, but O’Connell’s recommends that you order a size down from your typical jacket measurement due to the sweater’s generous cut. I typically take a 40 in a jacket, which would imply a 38 in the sweater, but I went the opposite direction and ordered a 42. I’ve put on a bit of body mass recently (mostly muscle, I hope), and I was aiming for a roomy, Crystalline fit. It was the right call: the sweater rolls and flows according to its own internal logic. It’s something I wear, as opposed to something that just sits on my body.

I stuck to an earthy palette with everything else: brown cords, gunmetal Oboz (which I’ve roasted to a nice warm tone verging on taupe), black Timex Expedition. Fall isn’t here quite yet, but I’m doing my best to manifest it.

I wore this a few days later, on the afternoon of September 6th.

That day, I hit the inaugural installment of Patina Studies, a menswear popup inspired by New York’s raucous Alfargo’s functions (more on this soon). I figured it would be a well-dressed crowd, but I didn’t want to overdo it and show up in anything too fussy. It was a warm, sunny day—San Francisco summer, remember?—so ties and worsted wool were non-starters. The best clothes are those you wear naturally, those you can’t help but wear.

For me, that means linen trousers from Casatlantic. I’ve been living in these pants all summer, from the weathered benches of the Hollywood Bowl to the rolling hills of Sonoma County. The linen feels light as a feather while wearing it, but it’s remarkably heavyweight, with a subtle surface sheen; you’d be forgiven for mistaking it for waxed canvas from a distance. The legs drape beautifully, anchored by cuffs I had my tailor make.

Besides a couple tune-ups with an iron, I haven’t had to do anything to keep them in good shape. They keep looking better with mileage, the way good clothes should. Lean into the wrinkle.

Up top, I paired the pants with an Oxford cloth button down shirt. This one is about as classic as they get: white, roomy, from Brooks Brothers. Not the most thrilling garment in my closet, but it’s a “can’t go wrong” kinda thing, the sartorial equivalent of a crisp can of seltzer.

As I’ve written previously, I’m a staunch proponent of layers (which is why I’m looking forward to fall, prime layering season), but it can be tricky in the warmer months. Open shirt/undershirt is a simple solution. Oxford is a hardy fabric that works just fine as a top layer, and the wide, boxy shape of the shirt gives it the kind of oomph you’d expect out of jacket. Just be careful drinking your iced latte—you’re not hiding any stains here.

Lastly, the hat. As a Dodgers fan living in the Bay Area, I’m faced with a choice between repping my team and repping my city. As cool as it might be, I’ll never wear anything bearing the logo of the vile Giants, so I’ve had to get creative. This is how I split the baby: with a hat from the San Francisco Seals, a minors team that played in the Pacific Coast League from 1903 to 1957.

Until I move back to Los Angeles, it’s the best I can do.

It wasn’t an eternity—it only felt like it.

This Friday, Big Thief is back with their first new record in nearly three years, Double Infinity. Don’t bother comparing it to their last album, 2022’s Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You; here is a release with eleven fewer songs and one fewer band member (longtime bassist Max Oleartchik departed the band last year, for unspecified reasons). These facts might imply a state of laxity, as if Adrienne Lenker, Buck Meek, and James Krivchenia are simply going through the motions, coasting on the identity they established over the last decade-plus as the most consistent unit in rock music. Nothing could be further from truth.

Double Infinity is not Big Thief’s first masterpiece (that would be 2016’s aptly-titled Masterpiece), nor their biggest leap forward (2019’s double shot U.F.O.F./Two Hands), nor their greatest statement (Dragon). It is something else entirely: their most elemental album, an unassuming, tidy little package destined, one day, to be remembered as (maybe) their best. It is the unmistakeable work of a band with nothing left to prove.

The first half of the album sails by in one long sigh, songs rolling ceaselessly one into the next into the next, breaking like waves of the shore of your cochlea. The opening barrage of “Incomprehensible,” “Words,” “Los Angeles,” and “All Night All Day” is the strongest four-song sequence on any record released this year. There’s a thrilling sense of momentum from the start, each track segueing seamlessly from what preceded. Some sort of hidden logic threads these songs together, a quasi-mystical rhythm glimpsed here and there in the language, particularly the delectable last lines of “Incomprehensible:” “Let me be naked alone, with nobody there / With mismatched socks and shoes and stuff stuffed in my underwear.”

Arrangements are busy, dense, striated—cacophonous, yes, but joyful, fully in tune despite it all. The first go at this material was made by Lenker, Meek, and Krivchenia alone, isolated in a woods way out off the grid. It didn’t work; the songs didn’t come alive. Eventually, the three called a mulligan, fled down to New York, and enlisted the help of a whole corps of collaborators. Thank god they did: this is music meant to be shared, a potluck of an album.

You’ll hear guitars and drums and supremely smooth bass work courtesy of Joshua Crumbly. You’ll also hear laughter and tape loops and the unmistakable presence of Laraaji, both his voice and his zither. His penchant for drone seeps into the record’s porous surface. There is a mantra-like quality to much of the music here. You don’t start and end these songs so much as you enter into and exit out of them. Surely, somewhere, they’re still going on, even when you’re no longer listening.

“Grandmother” especially. The first song written together by all three of Lenker, Meek, and Krivchenia, it’s a shaking, elliptical piece of music built around an unforgettable refrain: “gonna turn it all into rock and roll.” Love, bar, car, cloud, pain, rain—it’s all reducible to rhythm and blues. Rock music as alchemy. For this band, nothing could be a more appropriate mission statement.

As ever, there’s an aching romance to Lenker’s language, but it’s matched by a newfound sense of clarity. The record’s best lines are its most straightforward: it takes so much time to feel alive, why do I need to explain myself, there is no fear. It’s a warm gesture towards both the subject(s) of her songs as well as her listeners—call it prosaic poetry. The album’s best song, “Happy With You,” consists of a grand total of 13 words, three of which are in the title. No need to muddy the waters; some rivers just run clear.

Dragon New Warm Mountain was, true to its name, a mountain. It dared you to summit it, to devote yourself to the journey. It was—still is—an extraordinary experience, but not one you took often. Double Infinity is pleased to meet you where you are. Compact, portable, ready at a moment’s notice: it fits into your life wherever it might be led, from fluorescent, frigid Safeway aisles to windswept hills striped with dead golden grass swaying back and forth beneath creaking eucalyptus and great, gregarious oaks.

Turn it all into rock and roll.

“Double Infinity” is available Friday, September 5th

Hard Disk

Hard Fits: Osita Nwanevu — Part 1

Welcome back to Hard Fits, an interview series about menswear and the men who wear it. Today’s subject: author and journalist Osita Nwanevu…

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9 months ago · Ian Grant

A few minutes ago you said that politicians have been dressing shitty for as long as you can remember, and that it seemed to change at some point in the past. Can you nail that down any more specifically? Is there an era in which things transition?

I don’t really know. We all see these black and white pictures of Kennedy in the Sixties, right? It’s very hard to imagine John F. Kennedy standing on a hay bale [laughs].

With his back problems, he’d really have a hard time…

He probably would have.

I just spent the weekend up in Hyde Park, New York for a conference, I went to the FDR Museum. People understood that part of his appeal, part of what people liked about him, was that he was this sharp-looking guy.

An aristocrat.

An aristocrat, yeah. So like, I don’t know. There’s this dance that people expect you to do now where in the right settings, on the right occasion, you’re wearing the suit, but you need to be able to illustrate that you can unbutton your collar in a particular way and have a beer that an aide has handed to you and is making sure you’re not drinking too much of. And again, it’s kind of tiresome.

Trump broke from that pattern. He’s eluded that register entirely. The way that Donald Trump looks is just the way that he looks. He’s not amending that within the context of a particular setting. He’s just going in as Donald Trump all the time, and I think that’s probably part of why people like him so much.

So I can’t pinpoint the time [political dress worsened] exactly. But maybe we’re on the cusp of a new era.

We can only hope. You mentioned earlier the “Sunday Announcer” style, which seemed characteristic of certain Republicans. If you showed me pictures of two different marginal House reps who I didn’t know, I feel like I would have a pretty good sense of which one was a Dem versus which one was a Republican, but I have hard time pointing out exactly what gives me the sense beyond the obvious, like age and race. How would you characterize that difference, or do you believe there is one?

On the Hill, I don’t think the average male member of the House is going to look that different from party to party. I think maybe you’d see Democrats making bolder sartorial choices on average, in terms of like, the color of the suit they’re wearing. But no, I think there are just a couple people who are particularly notable for their dress, in good ways and bad. Y’know, Jim Jordan is notable for bad reasons—I don’t know how many copies of that yellow tie he has hanging around somewhere. But I don’t think that in Washington you see that many dramatic differences between the men.

I will say, though, that one that I’ve noticed—have you seen these Jubilee videos that people have been sharing on social media?

Where whoever sits down in the middle, and there are like 20 people surrounding them?

Exactly. They’ve done a couple of these where the 20 people they have surrounding the person they’ve invited are far-right Republicans. And there’s been this online discourse about how much those guys now resemble your stereotypical hipster from the 2010s. Men with man-buns talking about how they think we should be a white ethnostate. And people have found this really jarring, and sorta indicative of the cultural valence of some of the styles we’ve been used to as consumers. I’m not really sure what it all means.

I do think conservatives have spent a lot of time and money trying to infiltrate youth cultural spaces to try to recruit people. They know that they can’t take it for granted, as Democrats have, that the youth will be on their side. And it’s always this youth pastor, sitting backwards in a chair type of fashion—they’re always trying to stretch themselves in that kind of way.

Conversely, on the left, you see a lot of people—and I don’t think it’s necessarily in reaction to anything—but Mamdani seems to be indicative of an interest in more traditional styles of dress. Most famously the Menswear Guy, Derek Guy, on Twitter, is pretty outspoken about his left-ish politics, but he’s also making the case for traditional menswear, or at least articulating why the tradition is important to him.

So it seems like the signifiers that we’re used to aligning on one side or another of the aisle are kind of in flux, and I’m interested in seeing where that ends up shaking out.

It’s like with the 2024 election, there’s the narrative of race depolarization. This is almost like stylistic depolarization.

Menswear depolarization, right.

Can I ask you for quick takes on a couple other male political figures?

Sure.

JD Vance.

[Pause] Um…

I’m sure you love his politics, obviously, but just his appearance.

I’m generally an opponent of conspiracy theories. I think they’re a bad way of interpreting politics in the world. The biggest one that I’m nonetheless committed to is that JD Vance does in fact wear eyeliner. [Laughs] I’m pretty sure he’s doing something.

I’m not judging him, and I don’t think that’s something to be necessarily ashamed of. But I do think that’s a thing that’s happening that people are denying is happening—at the very least, when he goes on TV. This is another thing: every man who goes on TV is wearing makeup. Jesse Watters is caked up as he’s talking about how like, effeminate liberal men supposedly are. So at least on that level, I think JD Vance is doing stuff.

As far as his suits and stuff, I haven’t examined his cut in much depth, but he seems to be doing the standard politician thing. At something in Washington he’ll wear a suit, and I think he’s the kind of person who’ll go out on the campaign trail in 2028 and stand on a hay bale and do the rolled up sleeves routine.

Gavin Newsom, my governor.

I just… I don’t know that the American voter will be able to tolerate the amount of product that is in his hair.

I look at Gavin Newsom, and I see a shark—like, somebody who you’re probably gonna get scammed by. It’s the slick-back, it’s the cut of his suits, it’s his whole manner of being. I guess we’ll see what the American voter thinks of that.

Pete Hegseth.

Oh my goodness. I do have thoughts about his suits—I think his suits are too tight from what I’ve seen. They cling to his body and make him seem very constricted. So I’m not really sure what’s going on there. But he’s one of the people who’s made the leap from TV directly into politics, and I think he’s carried some of that slickness with him. He always looks like he’s just coming off some cable hit, even if he hasn’t been.

Back in the 9/11 era with Bush when I was coming up and starting to pay attention to this stuff, there was always the American flag pin on the lapel. And the way that Hegseth has perverted that concept, where he’s got the American flag pocket square, and the American flag lining in the jacket, and the American flag belt buckle, and the American flag socks, I just…

[Laughs] These are all violations, from my understanding, of the flag code. I’m not an expert, but my impression was that you were not supposed to use the American flag as willy-nilly as he and other people seem to be. I guess people don’t really care about that, and I don’t know that they should, but it’s interesting to note for a conservative.

Last one, another 2028 Dem frontrunner who’s maybe going through his own sartorial update: newly-bearded Pete Buttigieg.

Yeah, the beard stuff is really interesting. I think Pete is ok. I can’t really conjure up many thoughts about his dress, which is I guess where most politicians want to be. I have noticed in general, though, in Washington, this beard thing happening.

The person with the biggest glow up—and I think people should actually be writing about this, because it’s so remarkable—the biggest glow up I’ve seen in politics in my lifetime is Thomas Massie. He’s this Republican member of Congress, a Libertarian going up against Trump on certain things, and he’s been making a lot of media hits for that reason.

He’s like the one guy on their side advocating for the release of the Epstein shit.

That’s right. But like, he looks unrecognizable. And I think it’s kind of the facial hair, it’s kind of the whole ensemble. He got rid of the glasses…

I see this, yeah.

He looks very, very different. Ted Cruz grew a beard…

Awful beard. [Laughs] One of the worst beards in Washington.

[Laughs] But people think, for whatever reason, that it’s the thing to do now: to make yourself seem more masculine, to make yourself seem more ordinary. And I think that’s also a political shift. There was a time where, if you look back at a presidential poster, people were wearing the sideburns and the crazy facial hair, and that kinda faded out. And I guess we’re seeing a resurgence or return of beards in a real way.

Maybe we’ll see a bearded President. I don’t know if the country’s ready for that. Maybe that’s Pete. Maybe Pete’ll be a couple of first.

This has been great talking about some of the highlights (and lowlights) of DC dressing. Just a few questions, if you wouldn’t mind, about your own sense of style. How did you develop that interest?

I don’t really know where it came from specifically. I do remember that when I was in high school I was involved in Model UN, and everyone had to dress up for the conferences. I remember liking that process when a lot of people hated it. A lot of people thought it was one of the worst parts, one of the parts they didn’t like about participating. I remember always liking the process of getting suited up and choosing a tie and the whole shebang. So maybe there’s something innate about it.

As long as I can really remember, I had a passing interest in menswear, and that kinda burgeoned in college. I did not dress especially well when I didn’t have to in high school, and that gradually changed. I don’t know. I think people come to it in different ways, and I don’t know why it happened for me. But as I’ve become somebody who goes on television or appears on panels, it’s also become a kind of professional necessity to think about these things.

There’s also kind of like, a background—I don’t know if you want to call it ideological—question for me. So when I see people in Washington, or people on Wall Street, or wherever it happens to be, abandoning traditional rules of dress, foregoing the ties and foregoing the jackets—again this effort to pretend, to posture as though they’re ordinary people, but they’re billionaires—like, what does that actually mean?

I wrote about this a year, year and a half ago. There’s this photo that was taken at the G7, with all the world leaders—

Without the ties.

Without the ties.

They all look like shit!

They all looked bad. But it struck me, like: what does it mean that somebody with the power, as a U.S. President, to annihilate all life on earth looks like they hang? I feel like that person shouldn’t look like they can hang.

Right.

There’s some kind of fundamental dishonesty about that. Even in workplaces where they’ve eliminated dress codes, there are implicit codes, and implicit ways that you’re judged. People will suss out what kind of label you’re wearing even if you’re not wearing a tie. So have we really abandoned rules and made ourselves more free? Or are we actually sublimating these distinctions and differences in a way that’s kind of insidious?

Also, just for me, there’s this aspect of personal expression. I think that a tie adds something interesting to an outfit. I think it’s one more way you can express yourself and throw in some personality at a time when it seems like we’re all being pushed to abandon facets of individuality and individual creative expression for a kind of like, gray slurry society. And I want to resist that. I want to resist the Silicon Valley-ification of all parts of our life and culture, and I think that starts with being intentional about the way that you dress.

Individual flourishing. It kinda aligns with the argument of the book.

Exactly.

As a writer, how do you dress on a daily basis?

Right now [gesturing at himself] it’s kind of indicative. I’ll wear a button-down shirt, usually Oxford cloth with a button-down collar, and either jeans or slacks of some kind. That’s my everyday wear. In the summer, when I can, I’ll shift over to my collection of band t-shirts that are like, tight and packed away in a cabinet. I moved recently, and they haven’t been as accessible as they ordinarily would be.

That’s one thing about me. I really like music, I go out to concerts, I go to punk shows. When I’m out there, I’ll wear the jeans and the shirt and like, Chuck Taylors. And then I have this whole other thing where I’m going on a panel, or to some kind of event, and I’m wearing a more conventional outfit. And I like both of those things. I think that both of those things are who I am as a person.

I’ve thought, too, about how difficult it is to represent both sides of me in one outfit. I think the ways that people try to do this are usually bad. There’s a phase that I went through in college where I’d do the t-shirt and the blazer. Like, not a good idea! I don’t think it works. But it’s very hard to convey a full sense—at least for me—a full sense of all the different parts of you in the space of one particular outfit. Like, I like wearing suits. But also, I’m not—I hope I’m not—a square. And so what are the accoutrements? What are the sort of things that add a little bit of flair to whatever I’m doing?

I’ve gotten into jewelry for that reason. I’m becoming a ring guy, for better or worse. I was pleased to see Mamdani is a ring guy. It’s good to see that representation out there.

Lastly: favorite jacket?

This is actually pretty easy. I went to a wedding in India that a friend of mine was having, and we spent a little bit of time in Jaipur, which is a kind of artisan city in that region. And he took us to a couple spots where we looked at some jewelry, but also this big fabric shop. It’s this huge warehouse, they had all kinds of fabrics, and he was like, “If you talk to these guys in the back here, they’ll take your measurements and they’ll get you a jacket in less than a day.” Just have your measurements done, and they’ll bring it on the back of a motorcycle to your hotel.

Whoa.

It was crazy, and so I did it, and it’s still my favorite jacket to this day. Standard blue, a little textured, which I like. I hope we move to more textured looks in suits moving forward. But this thing’s got a little protection. I wear it all the time. You can do it with jeans, you can do it with more formal pants. It’s very, very versatile, and the fit is great—not too bunched up and tight, it’s got some room to it.

Unfortunately, it’s not a “go out and buy this” thing because you’ve gotta go to Jaipur and talk to these guys.

Buy “The Right of The People” today

Follow Osita on Bluesky and X.com

I’ve been a longtime admirer of Osita’s work in outlets like The New Republic and The Guardian, where he writes about politics and current events from a left perspective. The clarity of his prose and his thought process is striking, particularly in this era of slop and obfuscation. His new book, “The Right of The People,” is an excellent (and exceedingly readable) primer on the antidemocratic history of these United States, as well as the mechanisms by which we might bring about a brighter, more democratic future.

Fortunately for me, Osita is also interested in style—both his own and that of the American political class. Recently, we connected to review the sartorial state of the union, from Donald Trump’s authentic inauthenticity to Zohran Mamdani’s sack suits to John Fetterman’s wretched basketball shorts. What follows is an edited transcript of the first part of our conversation.

Alright, so I’m hoping to give you an opportunity here for a slightly more lighthearted conversation while making the media rounds. But just to start things off, can you deliver a quick hit thesis summarizing what you’re saying in the book?

So I think the 3 major points I'm trying to make in the book are one, democracy is good, two, America is not a democracy, and three, America should be a democracy. That’s the book in the tightest possible nutshell. It’s an exploration of what democracy means through an analysis of our political and economic institutions, and you hopefully come away with a sense that democracy is a project that is ongoing.

“Democracy is good”—that’s a fascinating concept.

It’s a contestable claim nowadays.

Well it’s a fantastic book. In the intro, you write, “democracy has become a specious and suspicious platitude, equally useful to marketers and would-­be dictators—­a hollow idea for a hollow, unserious time.” I can’t help but feel that statement applies to the sartorial senses of those in the political class as well.

Well, I think politicians have been dressing badly for a long time, certainly as long as I can remember. I think there used to be an age when people put more effort into their appearance, but I think in the last thirty to forty years—and nobody should quote me on this as a historian—there’s been a move towards looking like the imagined “Everyman” as best you can. You’re registering that you’re not a millionaire, or whatever you really are, by making certain choices about how you dress.

Men will go to the Iowa State Fair, for instance, and not wear a jacket. They’ll have this button down shirt that they’ve rolled up to their sleeves and that fits terribly, and that’s kinda the classic look now. Going back fifty, sixty years, you didn’t really see as much of this. There’s been a real effort to elide and erase the real differences that separate politicians from ordinary folks by making certain sartorial choices.

The other place I think this connects with the book is y’know—the conception of democracy I have here is one that I’m trying to broaden beyond “you should have the right to vote,” which is obviously important. But I try to talk about democracy meaning that we have the agency to shape our lives. That’s why we deserve the right to vote, and that’s also why we deserve rights as workers. It’s a conception of human life where you really take for granted our ability to determine what our values are, what we find interesting and important. We want to express ourselves as true individuals, not just people who are beholden to certain hierarchies based on the context in which we happened to grow up. We can make active choices about what matters.

These are all things that matter when it comes to style. The way that you dress is an expression of who you really are. The world that I imagine is a world where more people—all people, hopefully, not just the rich—can really express themselves and live the lives that they want to and have access to beautiful things.

I’m somebody who’s on the left, and I think that people often have this misconception of the left—that it’s about a kind of dour seriousness, that we’re anti-fun, that we want everybody to eat the same grey gruel at the end of the day, because that will fight inequality. That’s not what it’s about for me. I’d like a world where more people have more access to beautiful things, and I think that’s certainly an element of how I think about style.

On the note of dressing like the “Everyman”: Donald Trump is obviously a very notable exception to this rule. I wonder what your read is on his sense of style, which on one level is very clear and powerful, but which on another level bears almost no resemblance to the types of people that tend to vote for him.

I mean, I think one of the things that was so shocking about his first victory in 2016 is that he broke all the rules you’re supposed to follow. He didn’t do this whole song and dance of, “I’m not gonna wear a tie, I’m not gonna wear a jacket, I’m not gonna go out there in blue jeans.” I can’t even imagine Donald Trump in blue jeans. It’s like a photo of Bigfoot.

But that’s not the image of him that people carry in their minds. Many people who voted for him liked him because there’s this perceived distance between the lives they were living and the kind of aspirational life that Donald Trump was projecting on television. That was the jets, that was Trump Tower, and I think that was partially the suits. That’s what people think a successful person is supposed to look like.

Obviously, I think there’s a huge amount of artifice in his presentation and in the skin tone that he uses, or tries to use. There’s all kind of fakery. I’m not saying that Donald Trump is more authentic in any kind of way, but there is a kind of ineffable phoniness to the ordinary politicians standing on a hay bale that is, at the very least, boring. People have seen that for years and years and years now.

I think one of the things that attracted people to Donald Trump, too, is how novel he seemed—like he wasn’t just going through the motions. And so I think this is a point where people should feel—in all kinds of ways, not just sartorially—liberated as politicians. You don’t have to do this job of pretending. You can do something that is more authentic to yourself and that might even help you connect with voters more than you think. And I think we have politicians who are doing this on some levels, like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, [who is] very stylish. On the right, you have people like Anna Paulina Luna.

You have more people on the right in Congress doing these kinds of suits that I don’t really like—it’s what I call the “Sunday Announcer” fit. Y’know, the checkerboard patterns in pastel colors? Greg Steube is one of the congressmen who does this.

So you know, people are coming to to dress with a little bit more flair. I don’t know if you want to attribute that to anything in particular. But I think that voters are probably a little tired of the whole rolling-your-shirtsleeves-up routine. They don’t think it makes you anymore authentic than the next guy, because the next guy is also doing the same thing.

So yeah, hopefully this means that politicians will make more daring creative choices—if only to break the monotony of the way that political dress has looked for some time now.

Maybe some creativity in the mirror will lead to some creativity in the halls of power.

One thing I will say, though, to add to this, is that I think that the John Fetterman… situation…

I wanted to ask you about him.

[Laughs]

Go right ahead.

Preempting you there—he is an indication of how misleading some of these choices can be, and how people can often trade a kind of aesthetic perception for investments in the politician’s substance. Substantively, going around in basketball shorts or whatever did not make John Fetterman any more of a “leftist,” or more connected with the electorate. But he certainly traded on that impression for a long time.

Ideally, there’s a kind of balance where people aren’t pandering to you. People aren’t interpreting the choices people make as having anything to do necessarily with the kinds of policies and substance they’re committed to. I think that’s what I’d hope for most of all. Understanding politicians as people through their dress is interesting, especially for journalists, but it can’t substitute for real analysis of what their policies are doing for actual people. Style shouldn’t be used as a stand-in for any of that.

That makes sense. It sounds similar to the critique a leftist might make of identity politics, the Ritchie Torrreses of the world—someone who’s held up as the first gay and Black and Latino rep, but in reality is AIPAC’s biggest defender.

Exactly. And sartorially speaking, the converse of the Fetterman thing is, y’know, I think it would be wrong to distrust Zohran Mamdani because he looks like a more conventional politician and wears a suit and is quite stylish in ways that people on the left have shied away from for some time. I think that that is, frankly, one of the reasons that he’s had this crossover appeal. And I think that matters too.

There are ways that style can be a bridge. If you’re used to hearing from leftists who look a certain way, and then someone doesn’t look that way—it’s an object of interest, right?

One of the things that I find most flattering when I go out to speak to people, or I go out to events, is [when someone says to me], “Before you started talking, I thought you were a Republican.” [Laughs] Which is just a function of the choices that I’ve made sartorially.

What that means to me is there’s somebody who might not have been listening to me if I’d dressed some other way, who I’ve now hooked, because they’re more inclined to take a certain person who looks a certain way more seriously.

Because you’re wearing an Oxford shirt, basically.

Yeah, exactly. If there are people who wouldn’t be listening to a leftist if they’re wearing a hoodie, but they’re listening to me because I wear ties, and I can sort of infiltrate those spaces for that reason, I think that’s worth taking seriously as a matter of political strategy.

Absolutely. I wanted to ask you about Zohran anyways, because I think his appearance has definitely been part of the story. He’s always out there in the videos—especially leading up to the primary in June, when it was like a thousand degrees every day in New York—in the sack suit, and the tie, and the shirt, and the Oxfords and stuff. I interpret that as him trying to use dress as, like you said, a bridge to voters who might be skeptical of the policies, but if they’re being packaged as coming from a sober, legitimate candidate, they might be more willing to accept them. Is that your read on his approach?

I think that’s what he was doing, and he succeeded. Is this the right way to interpret politicians who come before you on a TV screen or social media? I don’t think so. But inevitably, people do make these choices [based on appearance], and I think it behooves people to be attuned to that, to be sensitive to that—at least in electoral politics.

This isn’t a prescription that like, everybody has to get “Clean For Gene” as they did in the Sixties. I don’t think that’s everybody’s responsibility or obligation. But y’know, one of the gaps that the left has had, or one of the challenges that it’s had as a movement, is that as much as people like people like Bernie Sanders—they think he has the right policies maybe, that he has the right concerns—there’s this credibility gap where people who believe all these things don’t necessarily believe that Bernie Sanders would be a good president, or that he could do all those things if he were president.

A lot of that is aesthetics. A lot of that is the way the guy looks to people who watch CNN and MSNBC, and the way they’re used to all the other people who appear on their television screens looking. And I think that that is something to be played with, worked through, and addressed partially through aesthetics. And I think that’s one of the reasons that Zohran has probably been as successful as he has.

Now, I don’t think it’s exclusively something you can chalk up to style. If he didn’t have the right message, I don’t think that would matter very much at all. But the viability of that message, and that it’s being carried to a broad swathe of New York voters, I think has something to do with his aesthetic presentation. Some of that is his social media efforts, and I think some of that is his personal style.

Part two of my interview with Osita coming next week

Buy “The Right of The People” today

Follow Osita on Bluesky and X.com

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I wore this on Saturday, August 2nd—the day I hit the Dead & Co gig at Golden Gate Park.

The Grateful Dead is, of course, the single greatest rock act San Francisco has ever produced (Girls is a close second). The city’s love for them runs deep; not even the sanitized, Waymo-fied circumstances of the present day can wash it all away. The Dead are also a massive draw, closer to a religious movement than a group of musicians. People travel thousands of miles and pay thousands of dollars to bear witness, even to a pseudo-cover band featuring only two (2) original members. As long as “Dead” shows up somewhere in the name of the band, the wooks are happy.

All of which is to say, “the Dead & Co gig” was really more of an abbreviated music festival than it was a standard concert. As such, it demanded special preparation, especially given its setting.

The Polo Field at Golden Gate Park is about a mile east of the ocean as the crow flies. San Francisco’s famous fog comes storming in fast, turning the landscape into a mystic woods straight out of a late era Van Morrison lyric. It gets cold and wet and windy, even in August (especially in August). Paths to the field run over ruddy dirt trails torn up by cypress roots and tire ruts. Walking west through the park from the Haight feels like a hike, even though there’s almost no incline or decline.

Once you arrive, you’re swept into a sea of 60,000 people. The vibrations are overwhelmingly posi, but it’s inevitable that you’ll be bumped, jostled, stepped over, and/or spilled on. You need tough, reliable goods that can go through hell and come out looking all the better.

That being the case, I built my ensemble around Carhartt double knees. This particular pair is black rigid duck canvas. This makes them somewhat slimmer fit than the rinsed or denim models, but boy can they take a beating. I’ve been putting miles on this pair for about a year and a half, and they’re just now starting to show signs of wear: softer insides, fades at stress points along pocket edges.

I’m doing the best I can to encourage the process. Pants like these are made to live in, and they should look like it. I throw them on anytime I’m moving shit around my garage or digging up the yard outside (where the reinforced knee actually serves a purpose). Still, it’s taking time.

A few weeks ago the fly zipper popped off the teeth. I was worried that might be the end of the road—it’s a heavy-duty YKK unit, seemingly tough to work with—but I took them into the woman who runs the local alterations spot and she fixed them right up. They look the same, they work the same, and no one’s any the wiser. It makes them mine in a way no other pair would be—even the most beautifully torched pair on Depop.

I wrote a little bit about the appropriation of Carhartt in the previous installment of this series. I stand by what I said then: it’s ambiently annoying, and it’s inevitable. I’m aware some people will spot the big orange C on my ass and clock me as a member of the “creative class” stealing blue collar valor. That isn’t quite true, but it isn’t quite false, either. In any case, the important thing is this: I don’t care. They’re great pants, and they make sense in my life. Doesn’t need to be any more complicated than that.

The other notable element here is, obviously, the fishing vest. It’s a little bit ridiculous, especially paired with the dyed long sleeve (on which I offered further thoughts here). That’s ok: big outdoor festival things are the right place the look ridiculous. Try it sometime if you haven’t. It’s fun.

It’s also functional. I hate carrying tote bags (annoying) or backpacks (swagless) at things like this, but I always have things to tote around. In this case, I ended up with a Dead & Co Nalgene (the only cool piece of merch sold in the entire place), an Olympus Infinity Accura point-and-shoot, a bandana, a foldable bag, and a custom-milled walnut joint/lighter stash case my buddy Tony gifted me on Shakedown (check his goods out here by the way). All that shit fit tidily into about three of the vest’s ten pockets.

On top of all that, it just looks cool. This vest is vintage Columbia, but all the compartments and carabiners give it a vaguely Engineered Garments flavor. The cropped fit pairs nicely with the higher rise of the double knees, and you can’t beat that warm khaki tone.

Up top, I finished things off with a favorite hat of mine. It’s made by Swampgoods, one of the finest purveyors of Dead and Dead-adjacent paraphernalia online.

When you go see your team, you wear your team gear. This is true for the Dodgers, and it’s true for the Dead. Still, you want to maintain some sense of self. You’re gonna see the same five pieces of merch over and over again in the crowd, whether it’s the mass-produced official shirts or the special edition tees Online Ceramics is slinging on Shakedown. There’s nothing worse than dropping $75 on a sick new piece only to find yourself standing next to three other dudes wearing the exact same thing.

A hat like this is the best way to reconcile these concerns. Besides, who doesn’t love Snoopy?

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I wore this on Tuesday, April 22nd—a while ago, admittedly. I’ve been busy, sue me.

This was the day before my third-third birthday. Otherwise, it was a Tuesday like any other: up at 6:30 AM, online for the day job at 7, off for lunch at 1 PM, quitting time at 4. According to my calendar, I taped a guest appearance on Justin Cox’s After The Deluge podcast at 5 PM. We rapped about Bon Iver’s bonkers third LP, 22, A Million, a record that meant a great deal to me in 2016 and still sounds great in 2025. Give the episode a spin if you’re interested.

I offer these trivial details to emphasize that this was an utterly average day, another brick in the wall of my life. I spent it mostly at home, in front of one of the two computer monitors secured to my desk. The only people who saw me for more than a minute were my wife and my dog, and my dog isn’t even a person. Still, I wanted to put a little effort into my appearance.

For whom a man dresses is an oft-debated subject in online menswear circles. Does he dress for sexual partners who might be attracted to him based on his style? Does he dress for other menswear types that might espy him throughout the course of his day? Does he dress for The Grid?

Personally, I dress for myself. It makes me feel good to look good, even if no one is looking at me. Plus, it means you’re already good to go if you decide you need to go somewhere. That’s what happened here: I ran out of coffee beans, so the dog and I walked up to coffee shop during my lunch to restock.

The main component here is the pants, which are made by Gramicci. Initially founded with a focus on climbing apparel, Gramicci now skews decidedly towards “lifestyle” clothing, whatever that means. Call it Carharttization: the appropriation of an identity through the wardrobe of those for whom the clothing was originally made. This has happened, is happening, or will happen to almost any legacy brand with enough authentic swag: North Face, Stetson, L.L. Bean, etc. Annoying? Without a doubt—but also inescapable, inevitable. Such is life.

In any case, the Gramicci goods are tough, low-key, and relatively inexpensive. They’re also made with a handy in-built belt, which you can adjust up and down depending on how much sodium you’ve consumed recently. These are their Rock Slide Pant. It’s a Goldilocks silhouette for me— baggy but not balloon-y, with enough length in the inseam to be worn cuffed or uncuffed as you see fit (this was a cuff day for me, but recently I’ve been letting them pool).

They’re a flexible pant that I can pair with almost anything in my wardrobe. Flannel and Blundstones? Yep. Work shirt and Oboz? Check. Hoodie and Salomons? No question. More importantly, they’re functional. Easy to wash, supremely comfortable whether in motion or at rest, and dig those wide patch pockets at the knee: the perfect size for 12 ounces of beans from Excelsior Coffee, my cafe of choice.

Up top, I wore a denim overshirt and a short, boxy t-shirt. The layers make everything feel a bit more composed, and the mismatched shapes allow each shirt to express itself without overwhelming the other. No jacket necessary—San Francisco springtime is perfect weather for going shirt-on-shirt.

I’ll have more to say about t-shirts at some point, but for now I’ll point you to this brief interview I did with my pal @vocalcharismatics about my all-time favorite tee and what I’m looking for in terms of fit, feel, and origin.

It was a nice walk, the beans were great as always, and I felt good about the way I looked, even though I was just on a quick errand.

The dog enjoyed it too.

Cian and I have been pals online since his appearance on an early episode of Jokermen. He makes ruddy, warm records that proceed according to a lackadaisical internal logic. There’s an easy, familiar romance to his sound—acoustic guitars, dry drums, plenty of pedal steel—that he also mirrors in his appearance.

After we started trading DMs about the peculiarities of the perfect pair of shoes, I roped him into a transatlantic call that began at about 1 AM Dublin time. What follows is an edited transcript of our conversation.

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Okay, so I'm not keeping you up like past your bedtime or anything.

It's a Friday night. I tend to turn in around like 3 or 4, anyway.

That's wild. I’m closer to waking up at that time.

Yeah, I'm falling into these music hours, which someday is gonna have to change.

It's the way of an artist.

When I'm 40. That's when I'll start getting up early.

What do men look like and dress like in Dublin? I have no concept whatsoever.

Well, one difference that I've always noticed when I've been in America: a lot more baseball caps.

I wear baseball caps all the time.

I mean, when I was like 11 and I was into Limp Bizkit, I was rocking the Fred Durst. But somehow, I just never really felt good in a baseball cap.

Last year I fell down a flight of stairs and gave myself a black eye, which was a bit of a disaster. Afterwards, I had this big shiner, and I was like, “I’m gonna have to do something about this, I can't be seen in public with this huge black eye.” So I started wearing this Olympics baseball cap that I found on the street. I washed it of course, but it was kinda cool.

So I was wearing it, but then some friends of mine said to me like, “No, you're just drawing further attention to the fact that you've got a black eye. You look like you're in disguise with this weird cap on.”

The only guy in Dublin in a baseball hat.

Yeah [laughs]. But y’know, style stuff is a little more global [these days]. Like the baggy jeans are in here, [at least] amongst younger people. Weird leather jackets. Some of my friends that aren’t into fashion at all are like, “Why are people dressing like my older sibling in 1996?”

We’ve come out of the skinny jeans indie rock look, but it took a while to get out of it here because Ireland is like a year behind London, maybe even more. We’re always a little bit behind trends. But yeah, if you’re like a music person—there’s always the sort of people who are into music but don’t see themselves as being into fashion.

Presentation on stage is a big part of performing—that’s the other part of it, besides actually getting up there and doing the playing.

I feel like things have changed a little bit recently, and it’s more accepted that people will be conscious of how they look and what they're wearing on stage. But for a while at least, in certain sectors of the “indie rock scene,” you just wore ratty 511s and Chucks and a shitty old T-shirt. Anything beyond that and you were “going pop,” or you were inauthentic. You were corny.

It’s funny, a lot of music people will be like, “No, I’m not into fashion.” But they’ll still spend 150 quid on a pair of Levi’s, or a new Detroit jacket. And it’s like, well, you’re kinda spending money on clothes here! It’s obviously something you care about. But the next step beyond that into designer stuff or vintage stuff is…

It’s a bridge too far. There's something disreputable about caring that much about your ensemble, or appearing like you care that much.

But you’re still spending money to wear the uniform. You’re still engaged in these things, you’re still caring about the way you look.

Before you play a show, do you put a lot of thought what you’re going to wear on stage?

Well I’ve been thinking about this. I’m going to the UK next week for some gigs, and I’m traveling light because I’m just touring on the train and hanging out in friends’ houses. It’s gonna be a low-budget affair. But I was like, “I can only bring one pair of shoes.” So what’s a good shoe you can wear on stage and not look too ratty, but you can also walk around in all day.

So I think I told you, I bought these Paraboots recently…

Hell yeah.

And they look smart. But I’m wondering, “Can I walk around in these all day? Or do I also need a pair of trainers for walking around in?” And then because I’m nerdy and get obsessed with weird little things, I end up looking up like, “What trainers does Bob Dylan wear?” Like what does he wear when he’s walking around? You know he loves a hoodie.

Oh yeah, and talk about baseball hats—that’s a man who wears a baseball hat.

I love that he’s always so clearly in disguise. Whenever he’s out, it’s like, “Who is that person that’s clearly trying to disguise their appearance?”

Anyways, I don’t know what I’m going to do. I can’t quite get comfortable in a pair of trainers.

I think I messaged you when we were going back and forth about shoes. I'm wearing the Oboz these days. They’re super-comfy and weird, like, Matrix-looking shoes.

That feels like a quintessentially Californian type of thing to me, a pair of trainers of some sort.

I used to wear a bunch of Adidas running shoes, then I went through a Hokas stage. And now I've got a little bit more of the NorCal crunchy granola thing going.

Did you do the Sambas thing?

I used to wear Sambas like 10 or 15 years ago. They're classic. I've worn Stan Smiths, I've worn Superstars—Adidas is just great shit. But no, over the last 5 years, no Sambas. Though not because I was like, “Oh, I don't want to be part of the Samba wave.” They’re always gonna be cool, whether or not they’re the hottest thing people on TikTok are buying.

Did you ever go down the Red Wings path?

Yeah, I had a pair for like two or three years when I was 21 or something. They're great boots, but I could never figure out how to integrate them into everything else I had going on.

You know that picture of Bob Dylan wearing the “Godspeed To You” t-shirt?

Oh, I’m very familiar. Is he wearing Red Wings in that?

He’s wearing a pair of Iron Rangers in that photo.

I’ve never clocked that!

I was looking at that picture and I was like, “Damn, Bob looks good in the Iron Rangers.”

But yeah, sometimes the Red Wing thing is [strange]. Because they’re expensive, they end up getting worn by like, guys that don’t do work.

That’s the whole story of workwear for the last 15 years, right? The only people who wear workwear now are people who do email jobs.

It’s funny. You end up looking like a film producer, or a graphic designer.

I take it you’re not on the workwear tip yourself.

Well that’s the thing. I am, but it’s a complicated relationship. I do love a French workwear jacket, like a chore coat. But like the Sambas, it’s become so ubiquitous. And it's sort of like, “What does this say about me?”

I was talking with my friend Sean recently. He’s gone from being a normal guy in indie rock clothing to someone into like, Issey Miyaki and Yohji Yamamoto—like high-end Japanese stuff. He’s starting to wear some wild stuff. And I have [an Issey Miyaki] jacket that he gave me, and it’s beautiful, but I’m like, “I don’t know if I can really pull this off.” I’ve tried, but I don’t know if I’m selling it.

I feel like I want to get a little weirder with my clothing choices. But then I still want to feel like myself.

Totally. I’ve got this torched Bedale that I’ve had for over a decade. I did like a three month backpacking trip through Europe in 2014, and I wore that jacket every single day. I still have it, and I still love it, but I find myself wondering like, “Do I look like the guy who just bought his first Barbour when he’s 32 years old?”

When I was a teenager, I always used to wear a Barbour I’d gotten from my grandmother, which somehow fit me. Every day going to school, I would always wear this Barbour coat, and I don’t think I really knew that it was expensive, or a “thing.” Recently I pulled it out again, and it’s all torn up to the point where I can’t really wear it anymore.

I live in the Dublin suburbs, just a normal middle-class area. But nearby is where like, Bono lives. If I take the train for two stops, I’m in the poshest part of Dublin. And their charity shops—or “thrift stores”—have good stuff in them. And so I was down there recently, and it was a half-price day in one of the shops, and there was a Barbour that was just like the one I used to wear. It was marked at 50, down to 25 quid. And so I was like, “I gotta get that, I can’t walk away from that.”

But it’s funny, because in Ireland—and this might be context that Americans are unaware of—you don’t want to look too Protestant. Protestant here means like, countryside, wealthy, old money, landed gentry.

Makes sense. That’s what we’d call a WASP over here: white Anglo-Saxon Protestant.

Exactly. And y’know, some aspects of good fashion are a little WASP-y, a little Protestant. I keep hearing people talk about the Ivy thing, which is not too far removed from WASP.

They were synonymous! The WASPs were the ones at the Ivy universities that ostensibly began the look whenever it was, 60 or 70 years ago.

I’ve grown up with friends that were Protestant and were like, “I’m not going to be ashamed of this. I’m going to embrace my Protestant look.” And I’ve had to be like, “You don’t want to look too Protestant, man. It’s not a good look.”

Catholic is the only respectable thing to be here.

Cian’s latest record is “She Brings Me Back To The Land of The Living”

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I’m writing from California’s beautiful central coast, on my way from San Francisco to Los Angeles for a week full of live music (more about this later).

A late-season storm system is blowing through this weekend, so it’s a bit grey today—tho fortunately no precipitation is forecast. A gale warning has been issued for Monterey Bay through tomorrow evening. It’s a good opportunity to wear tweed.

Typically I want to use this space to reflect on something interesting I’ve done recently, but I’m somewhat pressed for time at the moment, so I’ll just just state the following about the month that was:

• I got a haircut. It didn’t turn out exactly the way I envisioned it, but it’s a significant improvement over the pile of hair that had been sitting on top my pate for the past several months.

• It went to The Tonga Room, the greatest of San Francisco’s many tiki establishments, on my birthday. Drinks are expensive, food is a 3.5 out of 5 at best, and there’s a $15 cover charge past 7 PM, but it’s an incredible experience nonetheless: kitschy, civilized, delightful. A rare glimpse of the world that once was.

• I saw Randy Newman live for the first time at a taping of John Mulaney’s Netflix show. Knowing we’re big NewMen, John extended Evan and me an invite, so I booked a quick flight down for the day. We only got three songs (“I Think It’s Going to Rain Today,” “Political Science,” and “Sail Away”), but it was a magical moment. Randy commands a room like no other.

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I launched Hard Fits, a new interview series focused on menswear and the men who wear it. The first installment features a conversation with True Anon’s Yung Chomsky, one of the best-dressed leftist podcaster/fitness devotee/app developers you’re liable to find. Second installment coming this week with a pal from my little corner of the world of rock songs.

I also gave my own fit pic blogging its own home with Clothes Line Saga. In the first edition, I ran down the look I put together for an anniversary celebration with my wife: denim jackets, wool trousers, and dog-matched loafers. Next one coming soon, too.

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April was a great month for interviews on Jokermen.

I spoke with Michelle Zauner of Japanese Breakfast and David Longstreth of Dirty Projectors at the beginning of the month. Lance Bangs hopped on to rap about MJ Lenderman, Michael Shannon & Jason Narducy’s REM project, and the Pavements motion picture, and Julia Cumming and Nick Kivlen of Sunflower Bean came through for a very fun one last week. And I was thrilled to spend nearly two hours talking deep Beach Boys lore with the one and only David Leaf in honor of his essential new oral history of SMiLE.

We also hit Dennis Wilson’s legendary first (and last) solo record Pacific Ocean Blue with our pal Jason Woodbury—first half free here…

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…and second half on Patreon here.

Beyond that, we’re in choppy waters on The Beach Boys series, from Bruce Johnston’s 1977 solo record to 1978’s demoralizing M.I.U. Album. At least we had the chance to unpack and appreciate the never-released Adult/Child, Brian Wilson’s outsider big-band sequel to Love You. Some things are just too good for this world…

And speaking of MJ Lenderman—the man himself came through Never Ending Stories for a breezy chat talking Planet Waves, the meme-ification of the Himbodome, and, most importantly, what the “M” in “MJ” stands for.