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Piece of the Week

Last weekend, I went to Outside Lands for the first time, courtesy of friend of the pod (and now that we’ve met just plain ol’ friend) Dave Depper. I had a wonderful time, and I got to catch sets from favorites new and old: Geese, Death Cab, and my forever favorite band, the mighty Strokes.

There was also plenty of bullshit, as you would expect from a music festival in the year 2026, and I included a few tossed off thoughts along those lines in my write up. Unfortunately, the Instagram post I made to promote the piece seemed to break containment, particularly amongst fans of the insipid “Djo,” aka former Stranger Things star Joe Keery, and I was inundated with bilious comments from any number of equally insipid individuals.

Which is perfectly fine. I was raised in the fires of pre-social media message boards, so I can take just about anything that comes my way online—plus, engagement is engagement, baby. But the irony of dozens of strangers berating me for not being more obsequious toward brutally untalented millionaire pop stars was obvious (to me, at least).

Anyways, you can decide for yourself how mean I am:

Pods of the Week

Not much in the way of pods this week, as we’re on a brief hiatus gearing up for Jokermen 4: Leonard Cohen. Here’s a little bit from the announcement post I wrote on Patreon:

Since his passing a decade ago, Cohen’s legacy has only grown. Today, he’s acknowledged as one of the greatest writers and performers in the history of popular music. “Hallelujah” is known the world over (even if isn’t always his version), and records like Songs of Leonard Cohen and I’m Your Man are hailed as landmarks in the history of rock songs. Most significantly for us, Leonard is a man who continued making vital, extraordinary art right up until the very end, releasing one of his best-ever collections of songs just two weeks before he passed. Nothing could be a greater testament to the ethos of Jokermen.

Read the whole thing here.

~ ~ ~

On Never Ending Stories, we hit a few listener questions, including a delightful one asking our opinions on “Steel Bars,” a Bob Dylan/Michael Bolton collab from 1990. This little ditty had somehow escaped all of our notices, so it was a treat to stumble upon it at this late date, when, as Evan put it, it seems like we’ve already turned over every single rock in the Bob Dylan garden.

Chune of the Week

Cameron Winter: “$0”

Man, what a knockout.

It took me a while to get around to Heavy Metal. I don’t think I started seriously listening until nearly a year later, after Getting Killed dropped. Since then, I’ve returned to the record every couple months, drawn unconsciously to the cockeyed little snowglobe in which it seems to exist, and I’ve fallen madly in love.

Let me state for the record: I understand I’m not saying anything novel or interesting. Heavy Metal has been universally lauded since its release, and opinions on Cameron Winter and Geese are pretty firmly fixed—you either love ‘em or you hate ‘em. Still, I can’t go anywhere else this week. I knew when I woke up this morning that I needed to listen to this record. Now that I am, I’m thrilled all over again.

It’s probably best for the culture at large if Winter devotes himself to his role as frontman of Geese—a great rock band is a much rarer thing these days than a great solo artists. But damn if I’m not absolutely titillated by the concept of a Heavy Metal follow up. And what ever happened to those Carnegie Hall performances that PTA and Benny Safdie were filming…?

Fit of the Week

I wore this on Wednesday, August 12th to meet my friend Ori for dinner in Oakland. We went to Popoca, a California conceptual take on Salvadoran cuisine that has received rave reviews all across food media. It was good—I recommend the lengua pupusa.

As for the look, it was easy-peasy: chinos, long sleeve polo, Wallabees, and a nice little jacket to top it all off. I kept colors tonal throughout the base layers—dark brown shoes, light brown socks, dark brown belt, mid brown trousers, dark brown shirt—then used the black jacket to set everything in place, as if drawing an underline beneath the phrase, “Yes, I am wearing all brown.”

If you look closely you’ll see my left pocket is bulging out, indicating that my pants are a little tight. This isn’t a surprise: I’m about seven weeks into a “bulk” phase at the moment, so I’m packing on the pounds. After dropping from ~194 lbs to ~173 lbs during a “cut” at the beginning of the year, I’ve now gained nearly all that weight back. Most of it is muscle (hopefully), but some fat inevitably comes along, too.

I’ll continue to bulk for another 4-6 weeks, then enter a maintenance phase where I neither gain nor lose weight. Come January, I’ll start another cut to eliminate some of the excess weight I’ve added this summer.

Because I’ve learned how to control my diet and exercise regimes, I’m sanguine about my changing body. Though it impacts the way my clothes fit, I’m choosing to view it as an opportunity, as opposed to an obstacle. My new and different shape forces me to make new and different decisions about how to dress. How exciting.

It’s hard to feel any sense of passion at a music festival these days. I’m not sure it was any better in the past, but it certainly wasn’t worse.

In all likelihood, it was exactly the same. What was different wasn’t the music festival but the person there—namely, me. I cut my teeth at Coachella, on the wide, ranging grounds of the Empire Polo Club. They seemed endless in those days, as if the bounds of the festival stretched to eternity. It was an illusion, sure, but an effective one, especially with the mountains of the Coachella Valley ringing the premises, wide and impassive and eternal.

Outside Lands, on the other hand, is set in San Francisco, the city in which I now reside as a 34 year old man. The festival takes place in beautiful Golden Gate Park—one of the crown jewels of the city, and a far sight lovelier than the polo fields of Indio.

Still, the aesthetics of the grounds feel off somehow. The stages, which are bunched up right on top of one another, are separated by an elaborate series of passages leading to all manner of entrances, exits, VIP areas, and something called the “Golden Gate Club,” tickets to which cost five thousand dollars. I was rolling with something called a “Bison Black” wristband, which the woman at the box office described to me as “VIP Plus Plus,” but I was heartily dismissed by the doorman at the Golden Gate Club entrance when I asked if I could get in.

The point is, it’s clearer than ever that a music festival is not a place you go to see music. It’s somewhere you go to spend money and take pictures and wear outfits—all fun things, to be sure, and things I enjoy doing—but it’s worth calling a spade a spade right up front.

No complaining. Take it or leave it.

So here’s what I took:

FRIDAY

Geese are a better band than they were a year ago.

This wasn’t a better show than I saw last year—festival sets always leave something to be desired, even from the best of the best—but Cameron Winter and co. have undoubtedly gotten better at their jobs. How could they not? Peep that tour schedule.

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Piece of the Week

This week on the ‘Stack, I spoke with Nick Kivlen of NYC power trio Sunflower Bean. Nick recently released Addicted to the Sunset, a great little solo record influenced by any number of 2010s indie rock icons—most notably, the late, great Girls. Our conversations was equal parts downer and hopeful, mirroring the sentiments of the record.

Pods of the Week

Big one this week as we wind down our summer interview series ahead of Jokermen 4 (which on that note—stay tuned for an announcement next week): Steven Hall, AKA Nirosta Steel.

For anyone who’s been living under a rock—or who doesn’t inhabit my little corner of music geek Twitter—Hall is a former friend and collaborator of the legendary Arthur Russell. His new record My Skyscraper is a massive collection of unreleased tracks and demos touching on every genre from club classixxx to acoustic folk to avant-garde Mandarin-language compositions. Running nearly two hours, the record has somehow become the viral hit of the summer.

In case that description doesn’t already make it clear, My Skyscraper is less a proper LP than a career-spanning survey of the many shades of Steven Hall. Feel free to skip around the collection, hit shuffle, pick your favorites—there’s no “right” way to listen to the record. Hall told us as much in our interview with him, which was one of the most thrilling conversations I’ve ever had the pleasure of participating in. Here is a man who has lived a life and is ready to tell you about it.

Shoutout to my friend Eric Deines of ULYSSA for taking a flier on this stuff and getting it out into the world. He’s doing us all a service 🫡

~ ~ ~

On Never Ending Stories, we went back to our bag with this exquisite 1994 tape from Hiroshima, Japan. Everything here is great (“Jokerman,” “She Belongs To Me,” a positively vicious “I &I”), but the headliner is Bob’s first acoustic “Masters of War” in 30+ years. Sometimes it’s hard to tell how intentional he’s being with setlist choices, but in this case it’s crystal clear. This performance of “Masters” is not an accusation but an elegy—a small but heartfelt gesture towards the many thousands who lost their lives in the nuclear devastation of 1945.

We also touch on the conclusion of the Long Hot Summer Tour, the upcoming fall European dates, and my trip to the North Country to see Bon Dylan and Hibbing, Minnesota. Much more on that here if you’re interested.

Chune of the Week

Neptune’s Core: “Lemon Car”

Allow me to direct your attention to Pivot, the debut record from Neptune’s Core, a Chicago quartet composed of two pairs of sisters. Lead single “Lemon Car” is easily one of my favorite tracks of the year, a tight chunk of bubblegum garage pop that verges on addictive. Dig the elastic, wordless chorus they explode into at the 0:57 mark, which *pops* with just as much force as “Taxes” does at the 1:33 mark. If there’s a more satisfying 15 seconds of rock music released this year, I haven’t heard it.

I’ve been spinning Pivot a ton recently. The record scratches any number of itches: imagine a cleaned up version of the first Vivian Girls record with the catchiness quotient dialed way up, plus the laconic lyricism of early Courtney Barnett and a dash of Room on Fire guitar tone. An utterly self-assured debut, perfect for the dog days of summer. I fully expect big things from this crew in the future.

The full album just dropped yesterday, and I’ve got an interview with the band coming here in the near future. In the meantime, smash that play button.

On a related note: I’ve started a running Spotify playlist of all my Chune of the Week picks so far this year. Give it a follow to keep track of all the goods in the weeks to come.

Fit of the Week

I wore this on Sunday, August 2nd for a quiet day futzing around Wine Country.

Despite the fact that it was hotter than a crotch, I wanted to look somewhat put together. I feel compelled to dress well when I’m out of town, even if I’m only an hour away. Up top, I went with a tried-and-true summer formula, layering a standard beater with this neat short-sleeve camp collar shirt from Portuguese Flannel. As I wrote about a few weeks ago, the shirt is a thick cotton in a wide open weave, allowing maximum airflow as I walk around. Down below, I paired it with breezy, broad linen trousers from the kings at Casatlantic and a roasted pair of Tevas that look even more handsome than they did ten summers ago.

Everything is in a warm, natural palette that makes sense for bright, bone-dry Sonoma afternoons—even my clip-on eyeglasses shade. The purple Industry hat adds a touch of color contrast and sorta “settles” everything below. (I also like how it looks like a standard piece of company swag from a financial services firm to anyone not in the know)

I actually took this picture at the end of the day, after arriving back home in San Francisco. I appreciate the occasional opportunity to record a look after it’s been worn, wrinkled, and otherwise mussed. Fit pics are all good and fun, but clothes are ultimately for wearing. Sometimes it’s hard to keep that in mind.

Welcome back to Rich Text, an interview series.

Nick Kivlen recently released his debut solo album “Addicted to the Sunset.” After a decade place in the hard rocking New York outfit Sunflower Bean, Nick’s first record is a true one-man-band effort. The album is a bright, breezy listen made for long summer days along the California coast (these are, not coincidentally, the very circumstances under which it was made), and anyone with fond memories of the Girls catalog will find a lot to dig here.

During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, Nick and I spoke about making out-of-fashion music, proving oneself in the music industry, the future that no one wants, the Ticketmaster/Live Nation trap, being vindicated by history, and more.

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We spoke just over a year ago for the last Sunflower Bean record, and now you’re back already with the Nick Kivlen solo experience. The turnaround on that seems very quick. Did you already have this cooking this time last year?

I got home from the Sunflower Bean tour and I had this album idea formulated in my mind. I took a road trip up the coast to San Francisco with my girlfriend right after the tour stopped, and I was really soaking in the West Coast lifestyle in a lot of ways.

I usually start from a place of wanting to make an album that I want to listen to that doesn’t exist already. So to answer the question, I recorded it entirely last July and August.

It strikes me as the type of thing that like, you weren’t necessarily doing a zillion different takes or moving things around in Logic. It’s a pretty warm, “in the room” type of sound.

Absolutely. I wanted it to be like the albums from the Sixties and Seventies that we love that are just full of mistakes and really sloppy. It’s amazing what was actually allowed to come out back then. You listen to some of those older recordings and you’re like, “Wow, there’s so many mistakes on this recording.”

My favorite example is usually the Rolling Stones, because they were the biggest band in the world, and their albums are so sloppy. It’s incredible. There were millions of dollars riding on those recordings, and they were allowed to be so wild.

There’s certainly plenty of that with Bob Dylan, too. But don’t sell yourself short here, Addicted To The Sunset is a really nicely put together package of songs.

I think it’s fair to say this record has a different sound than Sunflower Bean. What made this the direction that you wanted to move?

I don’t think there really was any “idea.” Maybe the limitations of working at home without a band. The real focus of the songs are the chord progressions, the lyrics, and the melodies. And I kinda found this different ingredient list: bongos, shakers, tambourines. I had this Uni-Vibe pedal that I really loved that I ran the guitar through.

I really love all those early 2010s indie albums. Forever Dolphin Love by Connan Moccasin, Pleasure by Pure X…

I’m a huge Pure X fan. I’m so glad to hear you shout them out, because I feel like they’re kinda forgotten at this point.

I love all their albums, I think they’re one of the most underrated bands. And then Girls was a huge influence on me when I was growing up.

So I didn’t want to lead with that, but like, I’m the number one Christopher Owens superfan. And the first couple songs on this record, some of those guitar riffs that you’re playing totally remind me of Broken Dreams Club or Father, Son, Holy Ghost—just this classic, creamy sound.

It flashed me back to being 19 years old in 2011 and listening to those Girls records and being like, “Yeah man, this is what rock music should sound like.”

It’s funny, I feel the album I made is so off-trend. Underground music right now is very moody and very sparse. It’s either punctuated by like, the Alex G. pitch-shifted vocals, or Phil Collins-type drums. Everything’s very icy and cold right now.

This record ended up being a pretty positive, happy-sounding album, which is so not in vogue. But when I was in high school, the bands I thought were really cool—Deerhunter, Animal Collective, Beach House—they all had a major key, upbeat thing going on. So I think this album is a way of doing my most pure childhood influences at a time when it couldn’t be less trendy to do.

That’s what makes it the perfect time: just when everyone’s going one way, you go the other. You’re either way behind the curve or way ahead of it. Maybe both.

So did you play everything on all of these songs? This is a totally solo, all-you production?

Completely solo, to an insane degree. I was completely alone.

So it’s also a little bit like Paul McCartney’s post-Beatles stuff, McCartney or Ram, where he’s just like a one-man band doing it all himself. A homespun little collection of songs.

There wasn’t really an intention behind it. I wasn’t like, “Oh, I need to do everything myself.” It was more out of necessity than anything.

Had you been writing these songs over a period of time, and then you were ready to execute a chunk of them to make a record?

No, none of the songs existed before I started recording them. I would usually wake up in the morning and spend two to three hours writing. I had little ideas or snippets that I had going throughout the year. But I would go to the voice memo, grab a couple ideas, and then generally write the song in the morning and then record it in the afternoon. And usually not spend more than a day or two on 80% to 90% of it.

Then I mixed and mastered it at the end and added overdubs and drums. So it was usually a song a day.

That’s extremely impressive to me, as someone who like—even trying to get 500 words down on the page sometimes takes me a week because I’m such a procrastinator and a perfectionist.

I think I was just feeling really inspired in the moment. And I also felt like I had a lot to prove.

With Sunflower Bean, we started when we were 18. I feel like always having a career but never reaching a place where it’s really cushy, that crystallized me and my bandmates into really hardworking, striving musicians. And I think it’s been good for us in a creative way, because we still feel like we have a lot to prove and a lot to say. When you have a lot on your mind and all these themes and these emotions are coming to you, it’s kinda easy.

You say you feel like you had a lot to prove. Why?

I feel very lucky and fortunate for everything that I’ve been able to do within Sunflower Bean. But I always feel—and this is true of most careers—that there’s ups and downs. And we never had a moment where it was like, “Ok, we can rest now. We’re doing well enough financially and career-wise that we can kinda chill out.” It’s always been grinding.

And to come off our fourth record and an amazing summer tour with our friends Gift—when I got home, I was like, “Ok, well, I have a lot of time off right now.” I still felt like I needed to be on that treadmill.

My point is that it’s such an escape to be recording and writing music. For me, it’s literally like a drug. It’s the only time where I feel like I’m completely away from the world, away from everything. So it’s not something I need to force myself to do. Time never passes quicker than when I’m writing or recording.

That’s how it should be. Sink into that flow state, lose yourself a little bit and just turn into a vessel for ~the muse~.

It really does feel that way.

The album does have this decidedly upbeat, bright feeling to it. Is that reflective of where you’re at in your own life personally right now? Or of beautiful Southern California? Or is it just how it came out?

It’s funny, because a lot of the songs kinda oscillate between major and minor. That’s very of the Sixties. Most Beatles songs always had the minor bridge, and Elliot Smith songs, who’s a huge influence.

It’s more than just like, a song is minor and sad throughout. I was striving to write something that had that depth and just naturally gravitating towards that feeling of happiness, but then also loss and regret and angst. So even though the album sounds more major than most contemporary music, it doesn’t mean that it’s completely happy either.

Are there specific things that you’re responding to? Romantic partners, professional circumstances, deep family memories…

I think it’s like the wonder and the unwrittenness when you’re 20, and you still don’t know what being an adult is and there’s such a giant horizon and everything is malleable.

When I was 20, it was 2015 or 2016. That was a really malleable time in history, just a time of really radical change. 2016 almost feels closer to like 1966 than it does to 2026 in a lot of ways. And I don’t think anyone’s really happy with what’s happened over the last ten years.

If you’re happy with what’s happened in the last decade, you’re a scumbag.

It’s hard to even imagine scumbags being happy!

All these things, the future that’s happening that no one asked for… it’s just made me want to listen to and watch older things, things that existed before this context. I even think about that in terms of music videos or movies made before 2025, where it’s just going to be like, that is really old school.

There’s no AI. You know this music video doesn’t have AI because it was filmed in 2016. That’s going to be this giant divide in art history between things that might have AI and you need to be suspicious of, and then things that don’t.

I’ve had that same realization. It’s just a new mechanism of media literacy that we need to develop all of a sudden. Before 2022 or whenever, this was never a concern for anyone, ever. And now all of a sudden it’s a concern for everyone, all the time. It’s such a sudden and dramatic shift that we’re all still figuring out like, how do we even begin to interpret all this shit?

For sure.

So on that note, I’m guessing these are mostly AI guitar parts, right? And you just had ChatGPT write the song lyrics?

Yeah, I was just like, “Make me a Girls album.” [Laughs]

I think you played a show at Zebulon recently, right? Was that your first Nick Kivlen solo show?

It was the third one, but the first at an actual venue.

That’s another part of the project that I’ve been having a lot of fun with. I don’t want to just do a standard rock band, I want it to be a little more malleable. So I perform with an electric guitarist and then a percussionist who’s playing bongos, shaker, tambourine, and rain stick so that the vocals can really be at the forefront in a smaller space.

The first show was on my birthday. My girlfriend Meka and I, we threw it at our friend Jeremy’s gallery, Giovanni’s Room in Hollywood. And we had a bunch of readers as openers, and it was just much more intimate and DIY and free.

It really bums me out how expensive shows are. I understand completely that like, everything’s more expensive. But I love how in Los Angeles, people are creating these more intimate settings where you don’t need to pay $25 plus venue fee for like, a Wednesday night local show. That’s really important to me.

The whole ecosystem behind live music these days seems to be a bit of a racket, at least when you get to a certain level. You’ve gotta factor in the Ticketmaster/Live Nation aspect, and then the venues that take a cut of merch. And then when people are trying to get tickets to a show and the queue is filled with bots. There’s just bullshit piled on top of bullshit.

Everything’s becoming so expensive, and live music is a commodity. Like, if you’re in New York, and your produce is coming from Mexico and Southern California, it’s like, maybe strawberries year round just isn’t going to be a feasible thing in the future. These are luxuries that we’re used to because we’ve grown up with them, but they’re really insane commodities. Maybe live music is that way too.

That’s a good point. Sort of a depressing point, but a good one.

I grew up in Los Angeles—and I know you would have had a similar experience in New York—you just take it for granted that there are 25 things you could go do on any night of the week, whether it’s a movie at a repertory theater, or a band coming through, or some sort of reading. And maybe the infrastructure that it takes to sustain an ecosystem like that isn’t totally feasible.

Yeah. Really cheerful stuff! [Laughs]

I’m glad that we’re really getting to the bottom of the reality of the rock music world in 2026.

Well, I wanted to do something to respond to that. Ignoring all the economics and creating something that’s really intimate. It’s not to like, compete on New Music Friday on Spotify. It’s just for the people who I’m friends with, or people who really want to tap in.

And I think that’s the way to do it, because as soon as you’re making music to get like, a sync in a Volvo commercial, that just leads to shitty music, inevitably. Yours might not be the most financially rewarding approach, but it is the most artistically rewarding.

For sure. And I think that the people who stick to their guns for long enough eventually are vindicated by time.

Some of them, yes.

More and more so, I feel like people are going back. How many records from the Sixties and Seventies are considered lost masterpieces that have now been completely revitalized? Do you know this Robert Lester Folsom record?

I don’t think I do.

I’m just using him as one example, but I find him to be really inspirational. He made this really amazing album in 1974, and he’s touring it now as an older man, and his shows are selling out, and all his fans are in their 20s and 30s. It’s just really fucking awesome.

Well, I can’t help but ask here—I know Julia [Cumming, your Sunflower Bean bandmate] also put out a solo record. Are you guys just taking some time and following your own directions? Do you have plans one way or another?

We just played our only show of the summer last week in Milwaukee, which was awesome, and we hung out yesterday. I think we’re gonna start writing together maybe in the next coming weeks and see what happens.

Sure, so just see where it goes?

Yeah. I mean, I think the band is going to be around forever, hopefully. I would love to do it until we can’t anymore.

That’s great to hear. Because sometimes when you’ve got a couple of different creative influences in a band, and then they start doing solo projects… sometimes that leads to quietly figuring out a way to break up without saying so. But it sounds like that’s very much not the case with you guys, which is great.

I mean, it’s funny—you really do end up living through so many of the tropes of rock history. Which is embarrassing…

They’re tropes for a reason!

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August 8th

I wore this on Sunday, August 2nd for a quiet day futzing around Wine Country.

Despite the fact that it was hotter than a crotch, I wanted to look somewhat put together. I feel compelled to dress well when I’m out of town, even if I’m only an hour away. Up top, I went with a tried-and-true summer formula, layering a standard beater with this neat short-sleeve camp collar shirt from Portuguese Flannel. As I wrote about a few weeks ago, the shirt is a thick cotton in a wide open weave, allowing maximum airflow as I walk around. Down below, I paired it with breezy, broad linen trousers from the kings at Casatlantic and a roasted pair of Tevas that look even more handsome than they did ten summers ago.

Everything is in a warm, natural palette that makes sense for bright, bone-dry Sonoma afternoons—even my clip-on eyeglasses shade. The purple Industry hat adds a touch of color contrast and sorta “settles” everything below. (I also like how it looks like a standard piece of company swag from a financial services firm to anyone not in the know)

I actually took this picture at the end of the day, after arriving back home in San Francisco. I appreciate the occasional opportunity to record a look after it’s been worn, wrinkled, and otherwise mussed. Fit pics are all good and fun, but clothes are ultimately for wearing. Sometimes it’s hard to keep that in mind.

August 2nd

I wore this on Tuesday, July 29th to walk my dog with my wife.

It was a sunny day in San Francisco, so I was able to get away with just the beater on top. Typically I’m contending with a heavy stratus rolling in off the Pacific, so it’s always a treat when I get to go out of doors in an undershirt.

Down below I’m sporting the Big Up Pants from gnuhr, one of my favorite discoveries of recent years. Founded by Nur Abbas, a former Yeezy designer, gnuhr (the “g” is silent) specializes in lightweight technical gear with a decidedly futuristic bent that occasionally veers on Cronenbergian—peep the Warp Shorts and their perforated, slightly-disturbing elasto-organic waistband.

The Big Up Pants are made in the USA from 100% Ventile, an old-school technical fabric originally designed for British pilots in the Second World War. Light as a feather but fully waterproof (or at least close enough), it’s the perfect fabric for breezy Bay Area afternoons and evenings. Dig the drawstring cuffs, which can be cinched tight for a cropped fit (as they are here) or left undone for full flow. I can’t wait to put some miles on these suckers.

July 25th

I wore this on Saturday, July 18th for my best friend Ori’s wedding.

I’ve always wanted to give the full tuxedo a go, so when the dress code here came through as black tie-optional, I made up my mind to make it happen. After several months of trawling eBay, I came across the perfect listing: Hickey Freeman for Bergdorf Goodman’s, 100% Loro Piana wool, size 42R. A new tux of this caliber would easily run four figures, but deals abound second-hand. Suits are so little in demand these days that they’re often priced to move. In this case, I made a $210 offer on a $250 listing, and a week later I had my rig.

I’m pleased with the way the jacket fits. The shoulders are broad and padded, but the collar hugs my neck nice and tight—no collar gap here, folks. I had my tailor nip it in a bit at the waist to emphasize that classic V-shape silhouette, which the peak lapels also help accentuate. Besides that and a minor adjustment to the sleeve length, I didn’t touch a thing. A good tailor is important, but knowing your measurements is even more important.

The trousers are a bit on the short side. Were I purchasing a made-to-measure tux, I’d go for another 2”-3” on the inseam so that they break on top of my shoes. As it is, they terminate right around my ankle—not a problem, necessarily, though I certainly want them any shorter. Still, they’re nice and wide, and the single pleat is sharp as a knife.

Buying the suit itself was just the start, as I soon discovered. The properly-executed tuxedo also requires a whole host of accessories: a tuxedo shirt; matching tuxedo studs and cuff links; a silk bow tie; a silk cummerbund; proper black tie shoes; braces; and a pocket square. I pieced the following together over the course of a few months:

• a made-to-measure tuxedo shirt from Proper Cloth. I decided against the wingtip collar (too precious), but I went with the pleated bib for a certain Seventies indulgence.

• vintage Swank studs and links from eBay. Nothing special here—black face, gold-colored (but not gold) detailing. Most vintage stud/link sets only come with three studs, with the expectation that the wearer covers an additional shirt button with a vest. My tux was only a two piece, so I needed a fourth stud, which severely limited my options.

• matching silk bow tie and cummerbund from Shibumi Firenze. My go-to destination for neckwear—half the price of Drake’s, twice the variety. I opted for their largest bow-tie size (8.5 CM) to match the drama of the pleated bib on the shirt.

• black patent oxfords from Meermin. Part of me wanted to go all-in with a pair of opera pumps (the most proper tuxedo footwear choice), but I figured I was ~doing enough~ with the tux itself. Patent oxfords are a less conspicuous choice, and they stand up to stairwells and BART stations a bit better. And you gotta dig that shine.

• a silk pocket square, also from Shibumi Firenze. Despite the fact that the wedding was black tie-optional, loud colors were also encouraged. My wife Grace wore a beautiful green dress, so I tacked on a little green myself to match her and satisfy the wishes of the two grooms.

As for the braces, I cheated a bit and used a maroon set I’ve had hanging in the back of my closet for years. Proper black tie calls for white braces, but I figured I could keep my jacket on most of the night and no one would be any the wiser.

And y’know what? They weren’t.

July 18th

I wore this on Friday, July 10th to see my pal James Austin Johnson at Cobb’s in North Beach.

I spent most of last week hanging in basics, so I was looking forward to a chance to put on some damn clothes. Up top, I’m wearing a white OCBD beneath a James Coward Site Jacket in black gabardine. A favorite recent cop, the jacket has quickly become an integral component of my daily routine. It’s cut exactly the way a jacket should be: cropped body, drop shoulders, nice wide collar. Drapes beautifully thanks to the wool, which is just right for breezy San Francisco evenings. Works in just about any context too, whether I’m out running errands in jeans and a t-shirt or I’m getting done up to paint the town.

Here, I paired it with a pair of charcoal trousers (vintage Ralph from eBay, natch) inspired by a recent viewing of Single White Female, which features an absolutely delicious array of garments, including voluminous double-pleats like these. The key is the fabric—in this case, more wool. I already had a pair of Andrew chinos in the back of my armoire, but the thick cotton tends to be stiff, and it crease up throughout the day. No such issues with wool, which swishes with my gait in a clean, dramatic fashion.

Frankly, they could still be larger—both longer and wider in the leg. If there’s such as pants that are too large, I still haven’t found them. Still, they get the job done.

July 11th

I wore this on Tuesday, July 7th, when I walked up to my local horologist for a couple new watch batteries.

It’s been a little strange watching the rest of the country melt beneath raging heat domes while I dig into the fall/winter section of my closet. That, however, is summer in San Francisco—the coldest winter you may ever see. It’s been hovering right around 60° all week, with the breeze up and rushing in off the Pacific, so I’ve had to adjust accordingly. Not that I’m complaining. For me, dressing well means dressing in layers, so a cool grey summer is a sartorial blessing.

I’ve got a lot on my plate the next couple weeks (travel, wedding, festival, etc), so I’ve been taking it easy the last few days. Consequently, I’ve been dressing easy. This is about as put-together as I’ve been all week: wool sweater over a tee, a nice full trouser, and chunky trainers. Certainly not the most interesting thing I’ve ever worn, but how interesting do you really need to be sitting at the computer? Comfort can occasionally take precedence.

The pants are my favorite thing here—heavyweight canvas with an elastic waistband courtesy of Los Angeles Apparel. They’re a perfect in-between option: a little more put-together than sweats, a little more comfortable than denim or chinos. I tend to opt for pants like this when I’m kicking around home during the day, then switch to something with a fixed-width waist when I’m going out.

It’s a simple little thought technology I’ve devised for myself. As soon as I put on a belt, I know I’m ~dressing up~. Until then, anything goes.

July 4th

I wore this on Thursday July 2nd for our trip up to Sonoma for the holiday weekend.

It’s perfect summer weather in the Bay right now—low 80s, dry, occasionally breezy—so I took the opportunity to wear a new shirt from Portuguese Flannel. I’m typically skeptical of short-sleeve button ups, many of which strike me as juvenile, precious, and/or ~basic~. When I spotted this shirt at the great No Man Walks Alone, however, something about it caught my eye. They were sold out in my size, but I managed to snag one direct from the brand.

I’m glad I did. The heavyweight cotton allows the shirt to maintain its wide, boxy shape, which eliminates the slim-fit/Obama-era/Joseph Gordon Levitt vibes I’m often concerned about with short sleeves. At the same time, the open weave keeps everything light and breathable. Walking around in it, you feel constantly ventilated, as if planted directly in front of a perfectly-tuned air conditioner. The custard & cranberry color combination is nice, too.

I paired the shirt with some of my favorite pants, Casatlantic’s Tanger cut in a rich navy herringbone linen. I thought about going all-in on the mid-century leisure look with loafers, but I ended up going for something more functional and less referential with Bedrock Mountain Clogs. Shoes are always a great chance to do something dumb. Have fun with it.

June 27th

I wore this last Sunday to go to the mall with my wife and my dog. I love to go to the mall with my wife and my dog.

I don’t typically look to celebs for ~style inspo~ (most celebs dress poorly), but something about this photo of Josh O’Connor on the Disclosure Day press tour tweaked me. It’s a simple formula, well-suited for early summer heat: graphic tee + voluminous trousers.

I don’t tend to wear graphic tees these days—a man typically has no business wearing a graphic tee—but I make an exception for band shirts like this one: the official “Long Hot Summer” tour tee, copped at Bob’s Greek Theatre gigs last week. I’m absolutely in love with the back of the shirt, which proudly trumpets BOB DYLAN, then in teeny-text just below: “ᴘʟᴜs ᴏᴛʜᴇʀ ᴘᴇʀғᴏʀᴍɪɴɢ ᴀʀᴛɪsᴛs.”

I paired the tee with a new pair of Casatlantic linen trousers just back from the tailor, plus a pair of Tevas I’ve had in rotation for nearly a decade. Note the socks with the sandals, which fucks up the rhythm of the look and lends the ensemble a pleasant sense of wabi-sabi.

I could’ve easily gone dogs-out, too; a man’s feet are nothing to be ashamed of, at least as long as they’re well-maintained. Maybe next time.

June 20th

I wore this last Sunday, on my second night at the Greek Theatre.

On night one, I wore a fine new linen suit—Bob always looks his best for us, so I wanted to look my best for him. On night two, I was dealing with a few additional complications: colder weather, a longer walk, and concrete risers. These circumstances called for something a bit hardier, so I paired this beautiful vintage bootleg Bob tee (shoutout to Evan for the wonderful birthday gift) with a well-loved pair of Carhartt double-knees, always a good option for an outdoor rock show.

For shoes, I went with Oboz Firebrand IIs. Good support, comfy for long distances uphill, and they always look a little goofy, which I appreciate. Up top, I threw on my Henry’s Swoop Jacket, another sturdy piece that operates in the natural color palette—brown, black, white—of the rest of the look. Still, I wanted a bit of color to make everything pop, and I needed an extra layer anyways, so I added a vintage Five Brothers flannel between the jacket and the tee. It’s a small shirt that I can have a hard time wearing on its own (sleeves too short), but as a contrasting middle layer, it works perfectly.

This year, I began writing up a Chune of the Week in my weekly newsletter. While that section will continue to be published, I also wanted to collect every song I’ve written about on one easy-to-read page. So here it is: every Chune of the Week of 2026.

Smash that Subscribe button to get the full newsletter delivered direct to your inbox each week.

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And while you’re at it, peep the accompanying playlist on Spotify:

August 8th

Neptune’s Core: “Lemon Car”

Allow me to direct your attention to Pivot, the debut record from Neptune’s Core, a Chicago quartet composed of two pairs of sisters. Lead single “Lemon Car” is easily one of my favorite tracks of the year, a tight chunk of bubblegum garage pop that verges on addictive. Dig the elastic, wordless chorus they explode into at the 0:57 mark, which *pops* with just as much force as “Taxes” does at the 1:33 mark. If there’s a more satisfying 15 seconds of rock music released this year, I haven’t heard it.

I’ve been spinning Pivot a ton recently. The record scratches any number of itches: imagine a cleaned up version of the first Vivian Girls record with the catchiness quotient dialed way up, plus the laconic lyricism of early Courtney Barnett and a dash of Room on Fire guitar tone. An utterly self-assured debut, perfect for the dog days of summer. I fully expect big things from this crew in the future.

The full album just dropped yesterday, and I’ve got an interview with the band coming here in the near future. In the meantime, smash that play button.

On a related note: I’ve started a running Spotify playlist of all my Chune of the Week picks so far this year. Give it a follow to keep track of all the goods in the weeks to come.

August 2nd

The Strokes: “Dine N’Dash”

One of the few songs I failed to highlight in my write-up of Reality Awaits—not because it isn’t deserving of love, but because it’s so clearly an instant classic. A delicious, obviously “Strokesian” riff, airtight percussion from Fab, and any number of lines that would fit right in on Is This It or Room On Fire (“Do what you will, you can leave when you want / Leave if you want but I bet that you won’t”). What more could you ask for?

The critical reception to this record continues to baffle me. The day after I posted my take, Pitchfork weighed in with a muddled review that tried to give The Strokes some small amount of credit while ultimately settling for the same negative verdict as Rolling Stone. My brother in podcasting Steven Hyden wrote an extended (and predictably excellent) analysis of both the album and the critical reaction, but other than him (and Barack Obama, I guess?) it’s been difficult to find anyone who even halfway understands what’s happening here.

Oh well—not my problem. Just means more good music for me…

July 25th

The Beach Boys: “When A Man Needs A Woman”

I haven’t been spinning this little Friends gem a ton lately, but it’s still the Chune of the Week for one simple reason—my wife and I are having a dang baby. He (it’s a he) is due at the end of October. We may have a name picked out, but I won’t be sharing it until he’s out of the oven (and no, it’s not “Bob”).

We couldn’t be happier, but there’s been a lot of “hurry up and wait” for the last several months. Brian puts it well in this song:

You know it makes you nervous

When you wait for your boy

You wait nine months for a bundle of joy

There’s a baby

Yes there’s a baby about to born

“When A Man Needs A Woman” is going right on the nursery playlist along with any number of Beach Boys tracks (“Vegetables,” “Pet Sounds,” “Ding Dang”). Feel free to drop a line if you’ve got any nominations…

July 18th

Leonard Cohen: “Democracy”

In a career of sardonic songs that walk the fine line between cruelty and sincerity, perhaps the most sardonic song, walking the finest line between cruelty and sincerity.

Implicit in the structure of the refrain—“Democracy is coming to the USA”—is the fact that the United States is not, at present, a democracy. That may be good thing, in this universe at least: “democracy,” whatever it means to Leonard Cohen circa 1992, seems as much a threat as a balm, coming as it does through a hole in the air, from the ashes of the gay, and on a visionary flood of alcohol. At the same time, there’s a minor note of hope here, as democracy also manages to seep in through a crack in the wall (that’s how the light gets in, remember). A study in contrasts. Black and white, good and evil, yin and yang—that kind of shit.

Also a major jam, one realized with all the finesse of an well-appointed recording studio at the end of history. The song is shellacked with a certain uncanny quality that could come off as corny if it weren’t so utterly guileless. In that way, “Democracy” (along with all the rest of The Future) slots in neatly alongside many other early Nineties favs, from Under The Red Sky to 11 Tracks of Whack to Mutineer. Unlike those records, however, The Future finds its author at the absolute peak of his powers. It doesn’t take any extra legwork to find your way in. It’s just plain-and-simple Good Music.

Will have much more to say about Mr. Cohen in the future (har-har). Stay tuned…

July 11th

Panda Bear & Sonic Boom: “Graveyard”

I was wracking my brain for a few days this week, trying to figure out what I’ve been listening to that’s worth highlighting (other than mid-career Van Morrison, about which I’ve said more than enough recently). Eventually, I realized the pick was right there in front of me.

Literally: I’ve been humming “Graveyard,” the last track on Panda Bear & Sonic Boom’s new album A ? OF WHEN, all week, tooting out a poor imitation of the idiot keyboard tone that serves as the song’s foundation. It’s a laugh out loud sound, the type of thing you’d expect to accompany a chorus of dancing skeletons in a Max Fleischer cartoon.

I spoke to Noah & Pete for an upcoming interview on Jokermen, and they mentioned how humor is a big part of their music-making process—when they make each other laugh, they know they’ve got something good. That’s very much the case with “Graveyard,” which blends that honking organ with a steady beat, a classic Noah vocal, and Formula 1 racecar sounds into a groovy boogie about staying focused on the ~posi vibes~. Perfect mid-summer listening—breezy, fun, and catchy as hell.

A ? OF WHEN is not available on streaming services, so you’ll need to hit Bandcamp or your local record store for the official release. Otherwise, you’ll have to make do with the Youtube rip of the 7” single posted above.

July 4th

Van Morrison: “Philosopher’s Stone”

This section isn’t intended to just be random late-era Van tracks, but I guess that’s how it’s worked out so far.

Unlike the boppin’ “Did Ye Get Healed,” this one finds Mr. Morrison in a wistful, world-weary mood, pondering his unique burden. It’s a great conceit for a song, deploying the Philosopher’s Stone as a metaphor for whatever quasi-mystical process allows us to transmute the ruddy substance of our daily lives into ecstatic, eternal art. Lyrically, it’s classic Van shit: daddios, lonesome roads, and mystical mumbo-jumbo, all underwritten by a simmering sense of misanthropy (“Even my best friends, they don’t know”).

Musically, the song is a marvel, nailing that uniquely Morrisonian mix of melancholy, spiritual, and optimistic. Van lays down a little harp while organ and piano call and respond to one another like two stray cats on either end of a lonesome alley, strings swoop in from up on high, and you go out feeling like you’re just about to see the face of God. Makes for a fascinating listen paired with the alternate take released on the 2008 remaster of Back On Top, which is played as a straight blues. It’s still a solid number, but it utterly loses that misty sense of wonder that you can only ever get from peak Van the Man.

I may not have loved Wonder Boys, but salute to Curtis Hanson for introducing me to this one.

June 27th

Aaron Olson: “Who Do You Think You Are I Am”

We’ve got a great hang with Aaron on coming next week on Jokermen, but his new record, the descriptively-titled Songs Album II, is out today. There’s tons to dig here, from heady odes to Neolithic structures, to lush instrumentals, to paeans to everyone’s least-favorite type of party attendee, the punisher—all of it rendered in a warm rock songs palette that gestures toward any number of artists and subgenres without coming off as nostalgic or self-satisfied.

“Who Do You Think You Are I Am” is a hard rocker driven by an insistent single chord. Aaron borrowed bowler Pete Weber’s immortal exclamation for the title, transforming the nonsense phrase into an emotional, oddly-eloquent refrain that defines the center of the record. The finished result: doo-wop by way of madman-mode John Cale, with a dash of 80s Van Dyke Parks wordplay thrown in for good measure.

Songs Album II is not available on Spotify, so peep the whole album on Bandcamp if you’re into it. Music is worth paying for.

June 20th

Van Morrison: “Did Ye Get Healed”

These days, Van pops up in my mind every so often and I fall down the Celtic rabbit hole all over again. My current go-to is Poetic Champions Compose, a silky smooth slice of mystical jazz-rock mumbo-jumbo. Imagine The Nightfly-era Donald Fagen if he were an Irish Protestant instead of a tri-state area Jew and you’re not far off.

I really started loving Champions last year when Bob swiped the melody of “I Forgot That Love Existed” for the 2025 incarnation of “Watchtower.” Since then, I can’t get enough. “Did Ye Get Healed” is maybe the tightest cut on the record, a swingin’, soulful slice of shamrock muzak made by a man at a spiritual peak.

Let’s get to it.

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Pieces of the Week

The Strokes managed to deliver yet another polarizing record with Reality Awaits, a sometimes-meandering, sometimes-shocking collection of AutoTuned, iridescent rock songs. Universally loathed throughout legacy music media, I made the case that the album is, in fact, Good Music.

You can read my take for free right here on Substack:

I also wrote an extensive account of my travels in the North Country to see “Bon Dylan,” Justin Vernon’s Bob Dylan tribute act, as well as Bob’s hometown of Hibbing, MN. Paywalled, but feel free to sign up for the free trial to take a gander:

Pods of the Week

This week on Jokermen, I spoke to Azniv Korkejian, AKA Bedouine.

Last month, Azniv released her new record Neon Summer Skin, a graceful collection that blends Seventies AM pop, bossa nova, singer-songwriter, and about five other genres. We had a great chat about the fertile Los Angeles scene, Lisa Simpson, Leonard Cohen, her mom’s reaction to her recent profile in the New York Times, and much more (including a major tangent on Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Lebanon, where Azniv has roots).

Atypical conversation topics for Jokermen, to be sure, but I think it turned out really well.

~ ~ ~

On Never Ending Stories, we hit the so-called “Ionic Recordings,” a set of rerecorded tracks Bob Dylan made with T. Bone Burnett during the pandemic. The gimmick here is the medium itself, which Burnett invented in order to present the recordings in super hi-fi. The discs are (supposedly) unique, and they were auctioned off at Christie’s for about a million dollars each. Five of the songs hit the web recently, so we had to weigh in.

~ ~ ~

Finally, we wrapped our Death Grips side quest on Jokermen with an accounting of the band’s 30 best songs. Number 1 shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone who’s been playing along at home, but we still managed to slip in a few under-the-radar favs. Here’s hoping we can amend the list sometime this year with a few new favorites from the next DG LP…

Chune of the Week

The Strokes: “Dine N’Dash”

One of the few songs I failed to highlight in my write-up of Reality Awaits—not because it isn’t deserving of love, but because it’s so clearly an instant classic. A delicious, obviously “Strokesian” riff, airtight percussion from Fab, and any number of lines that would fit right in on Is This It or Room On Fire (“Do what you will, you can leave when you want / Leave if you want but I bet that you won’t”). What more could you ask for?

The critical reception to this record continues to baffle me. The day after I posted my take, Pitchfork weighed in with a muddled review that tried to give The Strokes some small amount of credit while ultimately settling for the same negative verdict as Rolling Stone. My brother in podcasting wrote an extended (and predictably excellent) analysis of both the album and the critical reaction, but other than him (and Barack Obama, I guess?) it’s been difficult to find anyone who even halfway understands what’s happening here.

Oh well—not my problem. Just means more good music for me…

Fit of the Week

I wore this on Tuesday, July 29th to walk my dog with my wife.

It was a sunny day in San Francisco, so I was able to get away with just the beater on top. Typically I’m contending with a heavy stratus rolling in off the Pacific, so it’s always a treat when I get to go out of doors in an undershirt.

Down below I’m sporting the Big Up Pants from gnuhr, one of my favorite discoveries of recent years. Founded by Nur Abbas, a former Yeezy designer, gnuhr (the “g” is silent) specializes in lightweight technical gear with a decidedly futuristic bent that occasionally veers on Cronenbergian—peep the Warp Shorts and their perforated, slightly-disturbing elasto-organic waistband.

The Big Up Pants are made in the USA from 100% Ventile, an old-school technical fabric originally designed for British pilots in the Second World War. Light as a feather but fully waterproof (or at least close enough), it’s the perfect fabric for breezy Bay Area afternoons and evenings. Dig the drawstring cuffs, which can be cinched tight for a cropped fit (as they are here) or left undone for full flow. I can’t wait to put some miles on these suckers.

Last week I went traveling in the North Country.

After a series of roadbumps getting out of SFO—there are always roadbumps getting out of SFO—I landed in Minneapolis around 11 PM on Thursday. The new Strokes record had gone live while I was in the air, so I gave that an inaugural listen on my way to the hotel (much more on that here). The next morning, I picked up a rental Hyundai Elantra, swung by Cecil’s Deli for a fine plate of eggs with my pal , then zipped out east for the 2026 edition of Justin Vernon’s Eaux Claires.

I was there for one reason and one reason only: Friday night’s headline set from “Bon Dylan”—AKA JV and co. cosplaying as Bob Dylan. The rest of the lineup was solid enough, but I’m long past my hardcore festie days when I would sprint from stage to stage in a vain attempt to catch every good set on the bill. These days, I take it easy and focus on one or two specific performances. Anything else is gravy.

I got a nice extra helping with the “Bon” set, a last-minute addition in place of Kevin Morby, who dropped out to be present for the birth of his child with Waxahatchee’s Katie Crutchfield. This was a rare win-win-win scenario: Morby became a father; Vernon got to perform his own material with zero pressure; and I didn’t have to twiddle my thumbs through a Kevin Morby performance. Sometimes things just work out.

The Bon performance (don’t call it “Bon Iver”) was a total gem: just Justin, an acoustic guitar, and a well-placed bandana around his now-fully-bald dome. After a Morby cover to start, Vernon dug out several classics, including “Beach Baby,” “Flume,” and “Re: Stacks.” The early Bon Iver material works as well today as it ever did, mostly thanks to the combination of Vernon’s exquisite singing and his elliptical writing. The mystery of a phrase like “Everything that happens is from now on / This is pouring rain, this is paralyzed” is fully elucidated by the delivery. It’s tough to get it off the page, but as soon as you hear it, you know exactly what he means.

Vernon has been cagey about his future as a performing artist, declining to tour the most recent Bon Iver record after several cycles of stadium headliner status. It’s a perfectly understandable decision, especially for another recent father. Still, it would be a real loss for rock music if he stepped away for good. He’s such a powerful performer, and his songs are so transmutable that they can work anywhere, from a streetcorner soapbox to the main stage of Coachella. In any case, he seemed to enjoy himself during the Bon set—maybe it’ll be a step towards an eventual full-fledged return.

Or maybe he’ll just go all-in on the covers act. If the debut “Bon Dylan” performance is any indication, Vernon has a bright future as the John Mayer of the Bob Dylan universe.

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There’s a song on Future Present Past, an utterly forgotten Strokes EP from 2016, called “Threat of Joy.”

I rediscovered it a few months while assembling UNCLE’S HOUSE, I FORGET, a playlist of all the best material not on their first two records. “Joy” is a major jam: neat, clean, catchy as hell. It features just about everything you love from The Strokes, from Julian Casablancas’s effortlessly cool vocals to the dual guitar attack of Albert Hammond Jr. and Nick Valensi. If it doesn’t sound exactly like an Is This It or a Room On Fire song, it doesn’t sound too far off, either. I remember thinking to myself at the time, “Why aren’t there 15 more Strokes songs from five more Strokes albums that sound exactly like this?”

The answer seems to be that there is no answer—not a satisfying one, anyway. It would have been the simplest thing in the world for The Strokes to settle into a B- version of themselves and churn out predictable, mostly decent releases every two to four years. These records would have been filled with songs like “Threat of Joy,” by-the-numbers numbers that could act as a sort of methadone for those of us who had overdosed on “Hard To Explain” or “Meet Me In The Bathroom.”

All things considered, this would be a pretty good reality in which to live, even if it isn’t the one that came to pass. And that’s ok. We have something better.

We have Reality Awaits, the long awaited seventh Strokes LP, and their first true release of the ‘20s. Their previous record, The New Abnormal, arrived in April 2020, right as the world seemed to be imploding in the face of lockdowns, mask mandates, and a particularly contagious novel pathogen. Though Abnormal seemed to speak to the times—paranoid, edgy, nostalgic—it was still a document of an earlier era, written and recorded somewhere toward the back half of the first term of the Trump presidency.

In the years since, reality has only grown stranger: uglier, dumber, far more brutish. This has left many artists (including some very good ones) seeming hopelessly out of date, adrift in a fearful new world that bears only passing resemblance to the one in which their music was initially made. Whatever else you might say about them, The Strokes are not one of these bands. Reality Awaits is proof.

The record is structured around three long, deliberate songs that challenge all expectations of what a Strokes song should be: opener “Psycho Shit,” “Falling Out of Love,” and “Liar’s Remorse.” Together, these tracks act as three legs of a stool upon which more Strokes-y sounding material is piled. “Going To Babble On” is the “Bad Decisions” of Reality Awaits, a New Wave-lite groove that rides a guitar lick you’re sure you’ve heard somewhere before, while “Lonely In The Future” marries a “Juicebox”-like riff with a bright melody that wouldn’t sound out of place on Angles, even as Julian natters on about Harry Styles, John Legend, and Anthony Fantano.

Much of the initial criticism of Reality Awaits (and there has been a considerable amount) has been focused on these supposed “disses,” and how embarrassing it is for an artist of Julian Casablancas’ stature to pick a fight with a lowly critic. To anyone up in arms, I would direct you to Lou Reed’s Take No Prisoners—specifically “Walk On The Wild Side” and the immortal Robert Christgau/toefucker riff.

Lou has always been one of Julian’s north stars, and for better or worse, it seems he still is. If Fantano’s name doesn’t have quite the same cultural cachet as The Dean’s, well, that’s more an indictment of the denuded landscape of music criticism than anything else.

Indeed, one of the most remarkable elements of Reality Awaits is how much Julian seems to have to say this time around. For a man who has made a career out of mumbling meaningless trifles, the sudden verbosity of songs like “Lonely” or lead single “Going Shopping” comes as a bit of shock.

To be sure, he’s no Bob Dylan. There are plenty of clunkers across these nine songs. One early favorite: “Sailed the seven seas, hunted wild rhinocerese.” Another: “Listen to the AI tell you what to do today.” But the contrast between Is This It’s iconically laconic anti-lyricism (“Boys act too much / Girls act too tough / Enough is enough”) and the Bozo Mode bitching of Reality Awaits is part of what makes the new record such a compelling listen.

Were these same songs the product of any old journeyman Aughts act, they might sound dissatisfying, if not downright desultory. But this isn’t any old journeyman Aughts act. It’s the motherfucking Strokes. What makes Reality Awaits interesting—what makes it good, and maybe even great—is the band’s willingness to confront and subvert their own legacy.

It’s also worth noting that Casablancas has become increasingly outspoken on political issues, particularly with regard to the genocide of the Palestinian people by the state of Israel. The Strokes were never considered a political band in their heyday. If they were, it was the wrong brand of politics, primarily due to their associations with wealth, fame, and privilege—these guys were “nepo babies” decades before the term entered the cultural lexicon.

Now here they are three decades in, and Julian & co. seem to have developed a political conscious. Is it a cohesive, well-articulated position? Not exactly. But in our existentially polarized reality, it’s sure as shit more compelling than most of what’s on offer elsewhere. “Going Shopping” is a perfect example, with its pointed lines about the difficulty of maintaining solidarity across class lines and the endless allure of treats on offer at the mall. Still, the band keeps things buoyant and propulsive amidst all the glowering, and Casablancas sings the entire song with a heavily AutoTuned whine, giving the proceedings a light glaze of levity. No one should take any of this too seriously—it’s only rock songs, after all.

The prevalence of AutoTune on Reality Awaits has been another fixation of early critics and listeners. It’s a perfectly reasonable element to call out—there is, to be frank, a hell of a lot of AutoTune here. But most of the criticism doesn’t seem to go further than noting its presence. Anyone at all familiar with the band’s work should know The Strokes are no strangers to processed vocals. They were there from the very first line of the very first song, a tinny plea crackling out of a blown out rotary phone. The AutoTune on Reality Awaits may not sound as cool, but it’s no more affected.

To be honest, I find it affecting, especially on “Psycho Shit,” a moody, laborious song that sounds like an album closer but is instead slotted in as opener. One of the keystones of Reality Awaits, the track plays like the credit sequence of a studio system picture, several agonizing minutes you’re forced to sit through before you get what you’re here for (to be clear, this is a compliment). Lyrically, Julian is fully in his feelings, lamenting that “only my beloved songs will define me,” his vocals flitting between semitones in spectacularly halting fashion.

You get the sense—I do, anyways—that he’s compensating for something, that he feels compelled to mask confessional songwriting behind a distant, inhuman voice. It’s like he’s after some sense of plausible deniability. Yes, those are his words, but is it really him?

It’s a deeply vulnerable moment from a man I once believed to be invulnerable. That such a sentiment is paired with tortured similes (“Like poisoned wine, your eyes are mine”) and cornball imagery (“Fuck me now under the moon”) only makes it all the more impactful. The coolest dude around has never sounded so uncool—and he’s somehow all the cooler for it. Call it sonic sprezzatura.

The final third of the album is undoubtedly the strangest. “Liar’s Remorse” kicks off with a feint towards reggae before settling into a maudlin dirge with a conspicuously absent percussion track. If you ever wondered what The Strokes would sound like without Fab Moretti, well, here’s your answer. It isn’t the most compelling thing here (it may in fact be the least compelling), but it adds some interesting texture to the overall package. Penultimate track “Fruits of Conquest” doesn’t do much to pump the energy back up, at least until the extended outro, which pairs a mondo riff and some classic Casablancas self-loathing (“I’m a leech, I’m a leech, I’m a leech, I’m a leech…”).

Despite its title, closer “Tyrants of The Mellow Moon” is an instant classic, with downbeat gunslinger guitar courtesy of Albert, canny syncopated snare fills, and a bonkers Julian vocal that sounds like a malfunctioning robot tuned to both the “cowboy” and “emo” settings. The best song here, and one of the best they’ve ever recorded, “Tyrant” is still an exercise in subversion. Instead of building towards a cathartic conclusion, the song seems to sublimate into the air, a ruined orgasm. For the masters of the album-ending climax—“Take It Or Leave It,” “I Can’t Win,” “Life Is Simple In The Moonlight”—it’s one final challenge to listeners, a good kick in the ass on the way out the door. I simply can’t stop listening to it.

To pick a nit: the album could certainly be longer. After six years away, returning with a nine song, 42 minute LP does feel a bit thrifty. But the relative brevity of Reality Awaits will look better, not worse, over time, as the record settles into its place in a greater body of work. The Strokes seem to have learned their lesson from First Impressions of Earth (secretly their second-best album), which was not quite a double LP but which certainly had two or three too many songs, causing it to lose a bit of steam toward the back half. Better to leave the party too early, it seems, than too late.

But I’m being greedy. Reality Awaits is a striking, purposed collection of music, one that clearly heralds a new era for the group. Halfway through the decade, they’ve already surpassed their achievements of the 2010s. In retrospect, Angles and Comedown Machine sound like interstitial albums, the work of a band that wasn’t sure what it was supposed to be. Whatever else critics may say about it, it’s clear that Reality (along with The New Abnormal) presents a cohesive, cockeyed vision of who The Strokes are in the modern age.

It should also definitively answer the most common question asked of the band over the past several decades—whether any of them even want to be doing this shit anymore. As Julian, Albert, Nick, Nikolai, and Fab all approach 50, four of the five are fathers, and each has (or has had) solo projects of varying quality and success. Live, they’re willing to play their parts, but not much more. Casablancas in particular often seems uncomfortable onstage, lurking in the darkness, mumbling off-mic wisecracks to no one.

Some of it may be an act, sure, but it can’t all be a put on, especially considering the simmering tensions that seem exist between himself and certain members. Which is ultimately what makes Reality Awaits so remarkable. Here is a daring, artistically adventurous record that is bound to disappoint at least some Strokes fans. It is very much not the work of a band phoning it in.

Judging by the takes posted so far, a more predictable set of songs—the hypothetical “Threat of Joy” approach—would have been more satisfying to many. Still, someone would have found a way to take The Strokes to task. At this point, the band seems doomed to disappoint regardless. Room On Fire? Too much like Is This It. First Impressions? Not enough like Is This It. Angles? Both too much and not enough like Is This It. And don’t even start with Comedown Machine.

The only thing more surprising than the sound of Reality Awaits would have been a warm reception from legacy media institutions. One way or another, it was always going to be “good try, we don’t like it.”

I have enough experience with late-era discographies by now to recognize an album like this when I hear one—a misshapen, oddly-paced collection that frustrates, confounds, and infuriates before being retconned into a masterpiece years down the line. Reality Awaits may well be The Strokes’ Shot of Love, or their Death of a Ladies’ Man, or their Love You. I can’t say for certain that it is—the record has been available for all of 72 hours. What I do know, however, is that this is an LP made for the long haul: not only today’s reality, but also tomorrow’s.

“Reality Awaits” is available now

Let’s get to it.

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Pods of the Week

My friend joined me on Never Ending Stories for a morning-after breakdown of the scene at Bob’s latest New York City show. And I do mean “morning”—we started podding at 6 AM Pacific, a scant twelve hours after Bob left the stage. Excuse my throaty Tempest voice, it takes a few hours for me to warm up into Nashville Skyline shape…

Sam can typically be found writing and podcasting about American politics, but he’s just as canny a Bob observer. We had a great conversation about the condition of current band, exposing friends and partners to Bob, and the burden of being a Dylan fan in the year 2026, among other things. It sounded like it was a lovely night at Forest Hills Stadium: a meditative, slimmed-down set (“Tryin’ To Get To Heaven” was cut, unfortunately) and a reverent crowd full of true heads.

Stay tuned til the end for an extra little riff on Bob’s ongoing Patreon exploits.

~ ~ ~

For the main course of Never Ending Stories, we traveled back to the fall of 2021 for a reevaluation of a momentous event in Bob-story: the very first Rough & Rowdy Ways Tour show.

With the Long Hot Summer Tour continuing its march across the country (not to mention another eight weeks of European dates coming up in the fall), it felt like the right time to take stock of where this all started and how far we’ve come in the ensuing half-decade. Right away, two things are apparent on this tape: 1) the Rough & Rowdy Ways material actually sounds like it does on Rough & Rowdy Ways, and 2) the band rocks. Bob and co. hit a few rough patches (as you might expect after nearly two years off), but the spirit and the sound in the room make this an extraordinary listen nonetheless.

Also managed to slip in a very fun tangent on Bob-themed cocktails, a hypothetical “Planet Wilburys” restaurant, and an animatronic Roy Orbison, which is in the teaser below.

~ ~ ~

On Jokermen, we hit Year of the Snitch, the latest (and greatest?) Death Grips album. We’ve got one last song countdown episode coming in the DG series, then it’s on to Jokermen 4.

If it wasn’t already clear who our next artist will be, give the last couple minutes of this episode a spin…

Chune of the Week

The Beach Boys: “When A Man Needs A Woman”

I haven’t been spinning this little Friends gem a ton lately, but it’s still the Chune of the Week for one simple reason—my wife and I are having a dang baby. He (it’s a he) is due at the end of October. We may have a name picked out, but I won’t be sharing it until he’s out of the oven (and no, it’s not “Bob”).

We couldn’t be happier, but there’s been a lot of “hurry up and wait” for the last several months. Brian puts it well in this song:

You know it makes you nervous

When you wait for your boy

You wait nine months for a bundle of joy

There’s a baby

Yes there’s a baby about to born

“When A Man Needs A Woman” is going right on the nursery playlist along with any number of Beach Boys tracks (“Vegetables,” “Pet Sounds,” “Ding Dang”). Feel free to drop a line if you’ve got any nominations…

Fit of the Week

I wore this on Saturday, July 18th for my best friend Ori’s wedding.

I’ve always wanted to give the full tuxedo a go, so when the dress code here came through as black tie-optional, I made up my mind to make it happen. After several months of trawling eBay, I came across the perfect listing: Hickey Freeman for Bergdorf Goodman’s, 100% Loro Piana wool, size 42R. A new tux of this caliber would easily run four figures, but deals abound second-hand. Suits are so little in demand these days that they’re often priced to move. In this case, I made a $210 offer on a $250 listing, and a week later I had my rig.

I’m pleased with the way the jacket fits. The shoulders are broad and padded, but the collar hugs my neck nice and tight—no collar gap here, folks. I had my tailor nip it in a bit at the waist to emphasize that classic V-shape silhouette, which the peak lapels also help accentuate. Besides that and a minor adjustment to the sleeve length, I didn’t touch a thing. A good tailor is important, but knowing your measurements is even more important.

The trousers are a bit on the short side. Were I purchasing a made-to-measure tux, I’d go for another 2”-3” on the inseam so that they break on top of my shoes. As it is, they terminate right around my ankle—not a problem, necessarily, though I certainly want them any shorter. Still, they’re nice and wide, and the single pleat is sharp as a knife.

Buying the suit itself was just the start, as I soon discovered. The properly-executed tuxedo also requires a whole host of accessories: a tuxedo shirt; matching tuxedo studs and cuff links; a silk bow tie; a silk cummerbund; proper black tie shoes; braces; and a pocket square. I pieced the following together over the course of a few months:

• a made-to-measure tuxedo shirt from Proper Cloth. I decided against the wingtip collar (too precious), but I went with the pleated bib for a certain Seventies indulgence.

• vintage Swank studs and links from eBay. Nothing special here—black face, gold-colored (but not gold) detailing. Most vintage stud/link sets only come with three studs, with the expectation that the wearer covers an additional shirt button with a vest. My tux was only a two piece, so I needed a fourth stud, which severely limited my options.

• matching silk bow tie and cummerbund from Shibumi Firenze. My go-to destination for neckwear—half the price of Drake’s, twice the variety. I opted for their largest bow-tie size (8.5 CM) to match the drama of the pleated bib on the shirt.

• black patent oxfords from Meermin. Part of me wanted to go all-in with a pair of opera pumps (the most proper tuxedo footwear choice), but I figured I was ~doing enough~ with the tux itself. Patent oxfords are a less conspicuous choice, and they stand up to stairwells and BART stations a bit better. And you gotta dig that shine.

• a silk pocket square, also from Shibumi Firenze. Despite the fact that the wedding was black tie-optional, loud colors were also encouraged. My wife Grace wore a beautiful green dress, so I tacked on a little green myself to match her and satisfy the wishes of the two grooms.

As for the braces, I cheated a bit and used a maroon set I’ve had hanging in the back of my closet for years. Proper black tie calls for white braces, but I figured I could keep my jacket on most of the night and no one would be any the wiser.

And y’know what? They weren’t.

Recently, I spoke with Matt Palmquist, Jack Schrott, and Henry Easton Koehler of Mildred, one of the finest new Bay Area bands to emerge in years. Low-key but utterly self-assured, the band’s debut LP “Fenceline” will thrill anyone with a taste for warm country rock, catchy choruses, and/or the work of the late, great David Berman. For more on “Fenceline,” peep my review on Aquarium Drunkard.

Mildred recently completed their first headlining US tour, and they’re currently plotting a fall European leg. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, Matt, Jack, and Henry spoke with me about stumbling into success by surprise, Fleet Week, Bob Dylan’s Long Hot Summer Tour, the status of the Bay Area scene, and more.

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Henry, I saw you at the Bob Dylan show at the Greek Theatre a couple weeks ago. Matt, Jack, I don’t know if you guys were there.

Matt Palmquist: Yeah, we were there.

Thoughts?

Henry Easton Koehler: I went to both nights, as did Matt, as did Will [Fortna, Mildred drummer]. I think Jack came on the second night.

Maybe it was just because it was first, but I was definitely a little more into night one. There was a harmonica solo on “Tryin’ To Get To Heaven,” that really did it for me. And then I was there with my dad who—that’s basically how I learned guitar, was my dad teaching me Bob Dylan songs. So it was a touching thing to see Bob at 85 [years old] with my father.

MP: I’ve missed Dylan in the past, and I [had] some regrets brewing inside of me. So we decided to do the double-header. The last time I had been in his orbit, I feel like it was the one and only time that he came to play in Duluth in Minnesota, where I used to live.

You saw him in Duluth?

MP: Well, so that’s the thing—I didn’t. I was just like, “Why would I go see Bob Dylan?” And like, the whole town went. And I remember feeling very silly about the whole thing, because I was too cool or something. I had the blinders on, I only liked the first couple of albums. I got introduced to him very early, but I didn’t really get into him until much later.

I carry some shame about it. So I needed to make good with the Dylan gods.

You’re atoning, I’m glad to see that. Repentance—this is healthy behavior.

MP: Forgiveness is part of life.

Yeah, no, it was great. I really liked it, it was beautiful. [Bob] reminded me of the priestess in the John Singer Sargent painting, where she’s like this priestess [in white], standing over an incense bowl. But like inverted, you know, with like this modern overlay. It was very cool.

Jack, any takes?

Jack Schrott: Well, it was my inaugural Dylan show.

Welcome.

JS: I feel like being a Dylan fan in Mildred is a pretty high bar to clear, because the other three are kind of sickos. And I love Dylan, but I’m catching up. And yeah, it was great. It was communion with all these amazing [people], just like so many fans of this incredible career. It was cool.

It was a great crowd. I loved all the greybeard granola-ass Berkeley homeowner-types.

HEK: I sat next to this guy, I think his name was Ed. He was wearing a newsboy cap, cargo shorts, and military boots. Grey whiskers on his face. He had a flip phone, and he was texting his friend after every song [telling him] what the song was. And then he would nudge me and be like, “You know that one?”

See, this is the beautiful tapestry of humanity you meet at a Bob Dylan concert.

HEK: Exactly.

How about the Mildred concerts? You guys just wrapped up a tour that coincided with Fenceline popping off a little bit online. How are you feeling?

JS: Tour was amazing. It was the first cross-country headline tour that we’d put together, and it was very much a group effort of like, email blasting a hundred bands in every city and latching onto the two that responded. But we played some really sweet rooms, met cool people in every city, and the response has been pretty surreal so far, to both the shows and the record.

MP: It’s very humbling, you know? I mean, I really like the record.

I hope you do, you made it.

MP: Well, yeah. But I’m really pleased to see people hear the same thing that I hear. That’s always validating. I feel like I’m constantly trying to meter what’s in my head with what’s in the real world. And there’s always such a big gap between those two things. So it’s nice to have the record feel like it’s one to one.

HEK: This tour was the first time we played shows where there’s like, a noticeable amount of people in the crowd that aren’t our friends and have just been spending time with our music independent of knowing us. So that was surreal.

It’s nice to feel like things are building. There’s some energy behind our music and people are reaching out. I think we were always gonna make more music, but it feels like now we’re gonna make more music and more people are gonna hear it, which is really cool.

I’m sensing a degree of surprise from all of you that the record has been so warmly received.

JS: Yeah, I was for sure surprised.

Why?

JS: I just have a sense of how much good music is out there, how many new bands we’re hearing who put amazing stuff out into the wind, which kinda disappears. So having people latch onto [the record], I feel super proud, but also I feel really lucky for just hitting things at the right moment.

Are you guys just thinking day-to-day right now, seeing what comes? Or are you making plans for recording again?

HEK: Kind of all of the above. We’ve got a lot of songs, almost too many songs, so we’re trying to make time to record them. We’re also having conversations with people in the music world and figuring out how much help we need. I think all of us want to keep this thing as low-overhead as possible for as long as possible, or at least we’ve talked about that. So we’re just figuring out what the next step is beyond trying to play more cool shows and record new music.

MP: We’ve got a big stack of things to get through. I think when Fenceline came out, we already felt a little backlogged. You know, these things take time and I think we’re just excited to keep going. Put more stuff out.

How long ago were the songs on Fenceline written? I’m wondering how representative they are of where you guys are in terms of writing voice and recording sensibilities right now.

JS: They were all probably written in 2023 or 2024.

So a few years ago.

MP: Yeah. But there’s always a lag, right? By the time that something gets written and recorded and shipped around to the powers that be, it takes a little bit of time. So I think they’re within the same universe of songs that we’re writing right now.

Which one are each of you most proud of? We’ll go one by one here—Matt?

MP: Man, that’s tough.

I’m very proud of the sensibilities that Henry and Jack have on the album. Occasionally I’ll go back and listen and it just catches me by surprise, even years later. They’re both very good poets, and they have this kinda “normal” sensibility, [or] hypernormal.

I don’t know. In some ways, maybe that’s what I’m most proud of—not a song, but the map, or the territory, that Mildred exists in. That it’s within this aesthetic canon that, weirdly, I think, is unintentional. It’s very nice to participate in something that feels very Pacific, very Northern California. It’s of its own ilk.

I feel that. Henry?

HEK: For the lyrics that I wrote, I think I’m most proud of “UPS Brown,” just in the way it turned out. And then of the songs that I sometimes still go back and listen to from the album, I think “Fleet Week” is just such a beautiful song. I love that it’s about San Francisco, and that it’s funny. It just hits.

“Fleet Week” is a great one. I hate Fleet Week, the actual thing, but “Fleet Week,” the song, is great.

MP: Why do you hate Fleet Week? I mean, besides the obvious imperialist critique…

The Blue Angels, man—too loud. Everyone’s all riled up, people are going down to Crissy Field… it’s just too much.

MP: Has your friend who lives in, like, Cow Hollow ever invited you to their rooftop to come watch?

Literally yes. I’ve done it once, and I never need to do it again.

MP: Ok, fair [laughs].

Jack, how about you? Which song are you most proud of?

JS: “Proud” probably isn’t quite the right word, because I didn’t write it, but I think “UPS Brown” is one of the songs that sticks with me the most. And it’s nice that it’s the first song on the album, because if I were to give somebody one taste of Mildred, that’s the song I want them to hear.

And then of things that I worked on on the album, I would say yeah, I like “Fleet Week” still.

The song, not the thing,

JS: Yeah, the song [laughs].

MP: They’re not mutually exclusive.

JS: The song was born out of my chagrin. I went into San Francisco not knowing that Fleet Week was happening, and I was just so jarred by the experience that I went home and wrote the song.

If you don’t know what’s happening, it’s a jarring experience.

JS: I didn’t even know it was a thing, let alone something that descended on San Francisco every year.

When I first found out about it, I assumed that it was a longtime San Francisco tradition stretching back to the Twenties or the Thirties. No: it was invented in the Eighties. It’s preposterous to me.

MP: They got that big old jet, and the big plane that comes down and does all the cool stuff.

They do. They do have the big plane.

MP: I’m pro-big plane.

I’m glad that you’re riding for Fleet Week here, Matt, I’m glad there’s a little bit of intraband friction. Keep things interesting.

I know you all have jobs, you’re normal people. Matt, you said you literally just got home from work, and you’re cooking dinner now as we’re talking.

MP: Gotta feed my wife.

I feel that, brother. But how do you guys balance work with being in a band? I know from my own experience, at a certain point there’s an inclination to make the thing that you like to do—like, to make that into your work.

HEK: It can be hard. As you say, we all have jobs. And it’s partly because we live here [in the Bay Area], and it just wouldn’t work if we didn’t [have jobs].

Music has always been the most important thing in my life, but I didn’t grow up being like, “I’m going to be a musician and make a living being a musician.” Like, I feel like this band happened because we started playing music together and then kinda stumbled into some support tours. And it was just too fun and important-feeling not to follow through and invest more time into. So we all had careers going as the band was forming, and we’re all now trying to figure out how those careers fit with the band.

And y’know, maybe at some point we’ll actually make positive money—right now, we make negative money, so our jobs aren’t going away anytime soon. At first, I was really cynical about it. The more time has passed, I’m feeling a lot more optimistic about making it work, but check back on me in six months.

Matt?

MP: What Henry says resonates a lot. A lot of us come from a similar vein of parents who are extremely supportive, but then also... y’know, it’s like the right hand supports, but the left hand sorta slaps you on the back of the head and says, like, “Get a job.” And it’s very confusing to a child, I think, to be simultaneously supported and also distracted from a musical career.

I think maybe in different capacities, we’ve all sort of approached our relationship with music in this kind of conflicted, traumatized way.

HEK: Jesus, Matt!

MP: Well, okay, I’ll speak for myself. Maybe not. I’m sorry, I’m appropriating the vocabulary. I don’t mean to do that. But whatever, a spade’s a spade…

The point that I’m trying to make is just that it feels really nice to exist in that space [where the value of making music is recognized]. I also think that there’s a certain amount of pragmatic reality. You think about Beethoven, or Haydn, or Tchaikovsky, or Wagner—all of these dudes from the 19th century who wrote these incredible symphonies, like they all had patrons, right? There has always been a kind of distance between the process of making music and the act of actually being able to practice as a musician. And I think we’re trying to navigate what that looks like.

I mean, personally, I can’t just go out and starve myself for weeks on the road, even though I have a lot of respect for people who do that. But we’re trying to find our own relationship with music, and to bring the best version of ourselves that we can, and to find a healthy balance.

I mostly just want to keep making music. I finally had a conversation with my mom the other day where she was like, “Oh, you have a sold out show in London.” We haven’t quite cracked her, but we’re working on it.

You gotta hit her with the Pitchfork review. Or maybe if you’d gotten a Best New Music—that would’ve been one thing…

MP: Yeah, seven point seven.

I thought it was like an eight-one.

MP: The listener score maybe…

I can’t even see the scores anymore because they blur them out like it’s pornography.

MP: Yeah [laughs].

HEK: It was a very nice review.

It was a nice review.

HEK: We thank the writer for writing it.

Absolutely, it was great. Jack, how are you feeling about all this?

JS: It’s a lot of new questions that I wasn’t really thinking through two months ago, just with all the new opportunities that have shown up since the release of the album. And yeah, I’m really excited about playing more music and growing the band. At the same time, I’m finishing up a PhD in physics right now, which is something that I’ve kinda planned on being my career for the last seven, eight years. I’ve put a lot of work into pursuing a career in that.

So I’m also contending with whether these new opportunities for the band are going to steer me in a new direction. Like Henry, I’ve always felt like music’s the most important thing in my life, even if it’s not something I was ever trying to pursue in a professional capacity.

Last question to end on, because I’m coming from San Francisco, and I know you guys are around—Henry, I just saw you and Will the other night at the Vetiver show here in the city. What’s your read on the Bay Area scene at the moment? Fifteen, twenty years ago, there was a real vibrant rock scene. And then throughout the 2010s, that kinda got washed away as the techies invaded. What does it feel like to be a Bay Area band in 2026?

JS: When we started, we had no feel for what the scene was—if there even was anyone. Part of that was just like, the nascent stages of the band were playing together at our house during COVID. And we weren’t even able to book many shows locally, because we hadn’t recorded anything.

As we’ve started playing some more, it’s been interesting to kinda plug into this whisper network of bands that do exist. It’s not a scene that’s visible from someone on the outside trying to scope it out, but we’ve found a surprising number of really good bands who are in our boat of like, maybe they’re not pursuing music full time, they’ve got jobs, they’re in school, but they’re really passionate about music on the side.

But in [terms of] cost of living, it’s not an easy place to pursue music full time. And I think those things are super correlated: the number of bands here, and how hard it is to play music and not work full time.

HEK: Yeah, I think I think it’s cost of living and then everything that comes with that. Like, if you drive into San Francisco on the Bay Bridge and you see all those billboards…

Oh yeah.

HEK: Yeah, there’s just certain parts of the city that you can imagine being an artist and trying to make it and feeling like this city’s not for you,, and feeling pissed and dejected. But then at the same time, it’s this rich cultural node for the country and the world and it has this incredible history. And there are still really great bands that are slumming it and have been doing it forever here.

MP: I’m very suspicious of scenes in general. Like, I think that creativity comes from having something to respond to. It doesn’t have to be other people having the same thoughts that you have. I think it’s obviously value-added to have other people hearing what you have to say and amplifying it. But in a lot of ways, what’s been nice about this networked universe that we’ve created is like, you can do that from a remote village in Portugal and still have something valuable to contribute.

I’ve lived in a few different places, and I feel like [the Bay Area] has, for better or worse, become my home. And I’m very unhappy a lot of the time living here and like, I commute into San Francisco most days, and I have pretty intense experiences many days of the week—both highs and lows. I don’t know. For me, Mildred is very much a balm for all of this stuff.

I really do think that there are a lot of people here who are actually invested in culture at large, that there is a desire for it. But the majority of this, let’s say, “consumer class” who live here, they don’t really know how to participate in that. But I really do think there’s tons of cool people here doing cool stuff. And the city’s going through a transition that’s… it’s like a slow march towards something that’s exciting.

From where I sit, I just wanna keep doing the things that make me happy, that I’m curious about, that I’m excited about. And as long as I can keep the machine around me whirring and, y’know, feed my wife dinner when she’s hungry, then I’m happy, and I’m winning, and I feel blessed.

I think there’s desire. People understand this place is special, and that’s an exciting territory to live in, to be in.

I feel that. It’s a part of the country—the Bay Area in general, not just San Francisco—that has such a rich musical heritage, from the history of rock music to the Fillmore jazz scene. But it feels like there isn’t “the thing” right now, it’s kinda up in the air—which is not to say that it’s gone and never coming back. I like the optimism.

MP: It’s like the Benedictine monks, or the Chinese. They think in centuries.

Follow Mildred on Instagram

Stream “Fenceline” on Spotify

Buy on Bandcamp

Let’s get to it.

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Pods of the Week

Main attraction this week: a very chill hang with Noah Lennox and Pete Kember—AKA Panda Bear and Sonic Boom—who just dropped their splendid new joint A ? OF WHEN. I tried to tamp down my inner AnCo nerd during the conversation (especially with a subject as laconic as Noah), but it still got the best of me when I brought up the 7” version of “Tomboy” and the buzzing hornet synth that Pete added to the album cut. If 16 year-old me knew that 34 year-old me would be rapping with these guys on a podcast, he would flip out.

I wrote a little bit about “Graveyard,” one of the best tracks on the record, last week—now hear from the dudes who made it.

~ ~ ~

Over on Never Ending Stories, and I ran down Foreign Tongues, the latest effort from the British bad boys themselves. It’s a refreshing change of pace for an octogenarian rock record: neither precious, nor nostalgic, nor fatalistic. Instead, Mick and co. clock into the rock songs factory and churn out another hour-plus of (relatively) Good Music.

Is it up to the level of Rough & Rowdy Ways? Not necessarily—but it isn’t trying to be, either. The Stones are doing it for the love of the game, plain and simple. Something admirable in that.

~ ~ ~

Finally, we’re closing in on the conclusion of our Death Grips series on Jokermen. This week, we hit some odds and ends towards the back end of their discography: Fashion Week, Interview, Steroids (Crouching Tiger Hidden Gabber), and Gmail & The Restraining Orders. I can’t say any of these are my absolute favorite DG releases, but together they add some fascinating texture to one of the strongest bodies of work by a 21st century artist.

Chune of the Week

Leonard Cohen: “Democracy”

In a career of sardonic songs that walk the fine line between cruelty and sincerity, perhaps the most sardonic song, walking the finest line between cruelty and sincerity.

Implicit in the structure of the refrain—“Democracy is coming to the USA”—is the fact that the United States is not, at present, a democracy. That may be good thing, in this universe at least: “democracy,” whatever it means to Leonard Cohen circa 1992, seems as much a threat as a balm, coming as it does through a hole in the air, from the ashes of the gay, and on a visionary flood of alcohol. At the same time, there’s a minor note of hope here, as democracy also manages to seep in through a crack in the wall (that’s how the light gets in, remember). A study in contrasts. Black and white, good and evil, yin and yang—that kind of shit.

Also a major jam, one realized with all the finesse of an well-appointed recording studio at the end of history. The song is shellacked with a certain uncanny quality that could come off as corny if it weren’t so utterly guileless. In that way, “Democracy” (along with all the rest of The Future) slots in neatly alongside many other early Nineties favs, from Under The Red Sky to 11 Tracks of Whack to Mutineer. Unlike those records, however, The Future finds its author at the absolute peak of his powers. It doesn’t take any extra legwork to find your way in. It’s just plain-and-simple Good Music.

Will have much more to say about Mr. Cohen in the future (har-har). Stay tuned…

Fit of the Week

I wore this on Friday, July 10th to see my pal James Austin Johnson at Cobb’s in North Beach.

I spent most of last week hanging in basics, so I was looking forward to a chance to put on some damn clothes. Up top, I’m wearing a white OCBD beneath a James Coward Site Jacket in black gabardine. A favorite recent cop, the jacket has quickly become an integral component of my daily routine. It’s cut exactly the way a jacket should be: cropped body, drop shoulders, nice wide collar. Drapes beautifully thanks to the wool, which is just right for breezy San Francisco evenings. Works in just about any context too, whether I’m out running errands in jeans and a t-shirt or I’m getting done up to paint the town.

Here, I paired it with a pair of charcoal trousers (vintage Ralph from eBay, natch) inspired by a recent viewing of Single White Female, which features an absolutely delicious array of garments, including voluminous double-pleats like these. The key is the fabric—in this case, more wool. I already had a pair of Andrew chinos in the back of my armoire, but the thick cotton tends to be stiff, and it crease up throughout the day. No such issues with wool, which swishes with my gait in a clean, dramatic fashion.

Frankly, they could still be larger—both longer and wider in the leg. If there’s such as pants that are too large, I still haven’t found them. Still, they get the job done.

Let’s get to it.

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Pods of the Week

On Jokermen this week, I teamed up with my pal Tim Heidecker to interview Jim Windolf, author of the great new book Where The Music Had To Go: How Bob Dylan & The Beatles Changes Each Other—And The World.

Jim takes the novel approach of juxtaposing Bob and The Fabs as they worked their way toward each other (both artistically and physically) through the crucible of the Sixties. While some of this is well-trod ground, the book’s switchback format situates events like Newport ‘65 or Shea Stadium in a greater cultural context, drawing connections between Bob World and Beatles Land that you may not be conscious of (shoutout Al Aronowitz). Even if you are, you can’t go wrong hanging with this crew for 300-odd pages.

Lots of fun on this one—Tim is as much of a Beatles nut as I am a Bob head, and Jim knows it all inside and out.

~ ~ ~

On Never Ending Stories, and I debriefed on Bob’s performance in Shakopee, MN, which featured not only new guitarist Joel Paterson, but other new guitarist Julian Lage, as well. This was no less than the *fourth* different band lineup deployed on the summer tour so far—and judging by the tape, it’s the best yet. Who knows what else Bob has in store for the back half of the Long Hot Summer Tour, but we’ll be following along every step of the way.

Chune of the Week

Panda Bear & Sonic Boom: “Graveyard”

I was wracking my brain for a few days this week, trying to figure out what I’ve been listening to that’s worth highlighting (other than mid-career Van Morrison, about which I’ve said more than enough recently). Eventually, I realized the pick was right there in front of me.

Literally: I’ve been humming “Graveyard,” the last track on Panda Bear & Sonic Boom’s new album A ? OF WHEN, all week, tooting out a poor imitation of the idiot keyboard tone that serves as the song’s foundation. It’s a laugh out loud sound, the type of thing you’d expect to accompany a chorus of dancing skeletons in a Max Fleischer cartoon.

I spoke to Noah & Pete for an upcoming interview on Jokermen, and they mentioned how humor is a big part of their music-making process—when they make each other laugh, they know they’ve got something good. That’s very much the case with “Graveyard,” which blends that honking organ with a steady beat, a classic Noah vocal, and Formula 1 racecar sounds into a groovy boogie about staying focused on the ~posi vibes~. Perfect mid-summer listening—breezy, fun, and catchy as hell.

A ? OF WHEN is not available on streaming services, so you’ll need to hit Bandcamp or your local record store for the official release. Otherwise, you’ll have to make do with the Youtube rip of the 7” single posted above.

Fit of the Week

I wore this on Tuesday, July 7th, when I walked up to my local horologist for a couple new watch batteries.

It’s been a little strange watching the rest of the country melt beneath raging heat domes while I dig into the fall/winter section of my closet. That, however, is summer in San Francisco—the coldest winter you may ever see. It’s been hovering right around 60° all week, with the breeze up and rushing in off the Pacific, so I’ve had to adjust accordingly. Not that I’m complaining. For me, dressing well means dressing in layers, so a cool grey summer is a sartorial blessing.

I’ve got a lot on my plate the next couple weeks (travel, wedding, festival, etc), so I’ve been taking it easy the last few days. Consequently, I’ve been dressing easy. This is about as put-together as I’ve been all week: wool sweater over a tee, a nice full trouser, and chunky trainers. Certainly not the most interesting thing I’ve ever worn, but how interesting do you really need to be sitting at the computer? Comfort can occasionally take precedence.

The pants are my favorite thing here—heavyweight canvas with an elastic waistband courtesy of Los Angeles Apparel. They’re a perfect in-between option: a little more put-together than sweats, a little more comfortable than denim or chinos. I tend to opt for pants like this when I’m kicking around home during the day, then switch to something with a fixed-width waist when I’m going out.

It’s a simple little thought technology I’ve devised for myself. As soon as I put on a belt, I know I’m ~dressing up~. Until then, anything goes.

Let’s get to it.

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Pods of the Week

The big news of the week (in my world, at least) was the shocking departure of Bob Britt from Bob Dylan’s band. and I caught up for a shoot-from-the-hip breakdown of all the drama on Never Ending Stories. Still a lot we don’t know (and probably never will), but we made our best Kremlinological efforts at interpreting the situation. One thing’s for sure: new guitarist Joel Paterson seems to have the juice.

Unlike our regular Never Ending Stories episodes, this one is free and unlocked for all. Give it a spin:

~~~

We also had a hearty debate about the Curtis Hanson film Wonder Boys, for which Bob Dylan wrote the Oscar-winning song “Things Have Changed.” The song is certainly better than the movie, but I came around a little bit on the film by the end of our chat. I’ll give it another go in a few years. Maybe it just takes some time to fall in love with that rascal Grady Tripp…

~~~

On Jokermen, we were joined by our friend Aaron Olson for a fine interview about his new record Songs Album II (which I also wrote about a little bit last week). One of my favorite releases of the year, scratches any number of rock songs itches—plus Aaron is a total mensch.

~~~

Over on our Death Grips series, we were joined by Benjamin Booker for a conversation about Bottomless Pit—the most Put It On record in the DG discography. Still trying to get to the bottom (har-har) of this one, but it was valiant effort from all involved. Great to hear thoughts on Death Grips from another genre-defying artist, as well.

Chune of the Week

Van Morrison: “Philosopher’s Stone”

This section isn’t intended to just be random late-era Van tracks, but I guess that’s how it’s worked out so far.

Unlike the boppin’ “Did Ye Get Healed,” this one finds Mr. Morrison in a wistful, world-weary mood, pondering his unique burden. It’s a great conceit for a song, deploying the Philosopher’s Stone as a metaphor for whatever quasi-mystical process allows us to transmute the ruddy substance of our daily lives into ecstatic, eternal art. Lyrically, it’s classic Van shit: daddios, lonesome roads, and mystical mumbo-jumbo, all underwritten by a simmering sense of misanthropy (“Even my best friends, they don’t know”).

Musically, the song is a marvel, nailing that uniquely Morrisonian mix of melancholy, spiritual, and optimistic. Van lays down a little harp while organ and piano call and respond to one another like two stray cats on either end of a lonesome alley, strings swoop in from up on high, and you go out feeling like you’re just about to see the face of God. Makes for a fascinating listen paired with the alternate take released on the 2008 remaster of Back On Top, which is played as a straight blues. It’s still a solid number, but it utterly loses that misty sense of wonder that you can only ever get from peak Van the Man.

I may not have loved Wonder Boys, but salute to Curtis Hanson for introducing me to this one.

Fit of the Week

I wore this on Thursday July 2nd for our trip up to Sonoma for the holiday weekend.

It’s perfect summer weather in the Bay right now—low 80s, dry, occasionally breezy—so I took the opportunity to wear a new shirt from Portuguese Flannel. I’m typically skeptical of short-sleeve button ups, many of which strike me as juvenile, precious, and/or ~basic~. When I spotted this shirt at the great No Man Walks Alone, however, something about it caught my eye. They were sold out in my size, but I managed to snag one direct from the brand.

I’m glad I did. The heavyweight cotton allows the shirt to maintain its wide, boxy shape, which eliminates the slim-fit/Obama-era/Joseph Gordon Levitt vibes I’m often concerned about with short sleeves. At the same time, the open weave keeps everything light and breathable. Walking around in it, you feel constantly ventilated, as if planted directly in front of a perfectly-tuned air conditioner. The custard & cranberry color combination is nice, too.

I paired the shirt with some of my favorite pants, Casatlantic’s Tanger cut in a rich navy herringbone linen. I thought about going all-in on the mid-century leisure look with loafers, but I ended up going for something more functional and less referential with Bedrock Mountain Clogs. Shoes are always a great chance to do something dumb. Have fun with it.

Let’s get to it.

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Pods of the Week

Death Grips Summer continues apace on Jokermen. This week we hit Jenny Death, probably my favorite single record in the DG discography. Not only is it Good Music, it’s Rock Music.

Coming out of two-plus years of Beach Boys coverage, these episodes have been a bit of a challenge for us: concepts like “melody” and “harmony” don’t really apply here, and Ride’s lyric sheets are so dark and dense that they resist analysis (and that’s when you can even understand what he’s saying in the first place). Consequently, we’re talking around the music as much as we’re talking about it. It’s a new rhythm for the show, but one that I’ve found quite rewarding. Hopefully folks dig it as much as we have—if not, it’ll all be over in about a month.

Then it’s on to Jokermen 4…

Over on Never Ending Stories, forced us to dive into the mud and muck of 1991. We’ve listened to a bunch of great tapes recently, so it was fun to flashback a few decades for a primo specimen of the nadir of the Never Ending Tour.

This show took place 10 days before the legendary Stuttgart performance—widely regarded as the worst Bob Dylan concert of all-time. There are plenty of rough patches (check that Paul Simon cover, for instance), but it’s not all that bad. There’s a tidy little suite of Oh Mercy material that (mostly) comes together, and I’ve never met an “It Ain’t Me, Babe” I don’t love.

Indeed, this tape made me feel oddly emotional. It’s a document of a severely-diminished Dylan, someone who knows he’s no longer the titan he once was. It wouldn’t be long before Bob summited the mountain once again, but for a couple years there, it really seemed like he was headed for a bleak final chapter. This show is a glimpse of what could have been but thankfully never was.

Chune of the Week

Aaron Olson: “Who Do You Think You Are I Am”

We’ve got a great hang with Aaron on coming next week on Jokermen, but his new record, the descriptively-titled Songs Album II, is out today. There’s tons to dig here, from heady odes to Neolithic structures, to lush instrumentals, to paeans to everyone’s least-favorite type of party attendee, the punisher—all of it rendered in a warm rock songs palette that gestures toward any number of artists and subgenres without coming off as nostalgic or self-satisfied.

“Who Do You Think You Are I Am” is a hard rocker driven by an insistent single chord. Aaron borrowed bowler Pete Weber’s immortal exclamation for the title, transforming the nonsense phrase into an emotional, oddly-eloquent refrain that defines the center of the record. The finished result: doo-wop by way of madman-mode John Cale, with a dash of 80s Van Dyke Parks wordplay thrown in for good measure.

Songs Album II is not available on Spotify, so peep the whole album on Bandcamp if you’re into it. Music is worth paying for.

Fit of the Week

I wore this last Sunday to go to the mall with my wife and my dog. I love to go to the mall with my wife and my dog.

I don’t typically look to celebs for ~style inspo~ (most celebs dress poorly), but something about this photo of Josh O’Connor on the Disclosure Day press tour tweaked me. It’s a simple formula, well-suited for early summer heat: graphic tee + voluminous trousers.

I don’t tend to wear graphic tees these days—a man typically has no business wearing a graphic tee—but I make an exception for band shirts like this one: the official “Long Hot Summer” tour tee, copped at Bob’s Greek Theatre gigs last week. I’m absolutely in love with the back of the shirt, which proudly trumpets BOB DYLAN, then in teeny-text just below: “ᴘʟᴜs ᴏᴛʜᴇʀ ᴘᴇʀғᴏʀᴍɪɴɢ ᴀʀᴛɪsᴛs.”

I paired the tee with a new pair of Casatlantic linen trousers just back from the tailor, plus a pair of Tevas I’ve had in rotation for nearly a decade. Note the socks with the sandals, which fucks up the rhythm of the look and lends the ensemble a pleasant sense of wabi-sabi.

I could’ve easily gone dogs-out, too; a man’s feet are nothing to be ashamed of, at least as long as they’re well-maintained. Maybe next time.

Let’s get to it.

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Pods of the Week

This week on Jokermen, I rapped with the great Mike Campbell. We spent some time talking about his latest album with The Dirty Knobs, the title track of which is inspired by Brian Wilson, but we also hit a ton of other favorites: Tom & the Heartbreakers, Fleetwood Mac, and even a little on the True Confessions Tour with Bob Dylan in 1986. An honor to spend some time picking the brain of a rock songs legend.

We’re up to Niggas on The Moon on our Patreon-exclusive Death Grips series. Heady record, appropriately heady episode. Thanks to Evan for carrying my ass on this one.

On Never Ending Stories, I enjoyed discussing Bob Dylan’s recent performance at the Greek Theatre with my wife, my father, my sisters, and my soon-to-be brother-in-law. The family that pods together stays together.

On that note: I also wrote up my weekend with Bob for Ray Padgett’s essential Flagging Down The Double E’s. The fam and I reeled off some morning-after thoughts without any preparation on the pod, so it was nice to spend a bit more time thinking through the greater significance of the so-called Long Hot Summer Tour.

I’ll say this much: if I ever hear “Black Rider” again, it’ll be too soon.

Chune of the Week

Van Morrison: “Did Ye Get Healed”

These days, Van pops up in my mind every so often and I fall down the Celtic rabbit hole all over again. My current go-to is Poetic Champions Compose, a silky smooth slice of mystical jazz-rock mumbo-jumbo. Imagine The Nightfly-era Donald Fagen if he were an Irish Protestant instead of a tri-state area Jew and you’re not far off.

I really started loving Champions last year when Bob swiped the melody of “I Forgot That Love Existed” for the 2025 incarnation of “Watchtower.” Since then, I can’t get enough. “Did Ye Get Healed” is maybe the tightest cut on the record, a swingin’, soulful slice of shamrock muzak made by a man at a spiritual peak. Dig:

Fit of the Week

I wore this last Sunday, on my second night at the Greek Theatre.

On night one, I wore a fine new linen suit—Bob always looks his best for us, so I wanted to look my best for him. On night two, I was dealing with a few additional complications: colder weather, a longer walk, and concrete risers. These circumstances called for something a bit hardier, so I paired this beautiful vintage bootleg Bob tee (shoutout to Evan for the wonderful birthday gift) with a well-loved pair of Carhartt double-knees, always a good option for an outdoor rock show.

For shoes, I went with Oboz Firebrand IIs. Good support, comfy for long distances uphill, and they always look a little goofy, which I appreciate. Up top, I threw on my Henry’s Swoop Jacket, another sturdy piece that operates in the natural color palette—brown, black, white—of the rest of the look. Still, I wanted a bit of color to make everything pop, and I needed an extra layer anyways, so I added a vintage Five Brothers flannel between the jacket and the tee. It’s a small shirt that I can have a hard time wearing on its own (sleeves too short), but as a contrasting middle layer, it works perfectly.

I’m hoping to answer reader questions in future installments of this digest. Drop me a line below—anything goes!

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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.

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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