My buddy Lucas (the same one who told me about POTUSA) is always sending me heavier stuff to listen to.

This song in particular caught my attention right away, and it quickly became one of my favorite songs to rock out to. The rhythms are so complex that every subsequent listen is an opportunity to hear something new.

What makes me identify with music like this is the precision and order.

Plini, to me, is the epitome of coordination and process. The riffs are so intricate and detailed that it must require a ton of effort to ensure the musicians are playing the same piece.

Music like this is comforting to me because it feels like some order can be achieved even in the midst of complete chaos.

All this talk of precision gave me a realization: I’ve never been good at improvising with music. I don’t understand it.

If you want someone to sight read a piece and play it exactly as it’s written on page, I’m your man.

If you want to ask someone to solo in the key of G major, you’d be best sniffing elsewhere.

The best improv musicians I am aware from operate on a completely different plane than me. What they make doesn’t necessarily get pulled from their brains; rather, the music comes from their hearts.

That’s not to say that playing with precision is soulless. I take so much joy from being able to master a particularly challenging musical riff.

I just wish I could also get good at letting my heart take the lead from time to time.

I just met this girl a couple hours ago, and she’s clearly the coolest girl I’ve ever met.

One of the very first things she asked me after we met was if I wanted to see a magic trick.

She presents a deck of cards and asks me to pick a card.

Yes, she ultimately revealed my card.

Yes, it blew me away.

We start talking about Four Loko, which had recently been banned across the country. After doing a favor for a friend who paid me with a cardboard box filled with various malt liquors, I mentioned to her that I have some of the real stuff in my trunk.

I did have to warn her, though, that it was expired and had been sitting in the trunk for at least a couple days.

She didn’t care. We each grabbed one and slammed them.

After a couple more drinks, we decide to walk to Blarney’s, a bar that’s not too far from the Dinkytown home of our mutual friend whose sidewalk is now covered in shotgunned Four Loko runoff.

This was a random Thursday night in December. We both had stuff to do early the next morning. I had to film something for my internship. She needed to drive back to Wisconsin for a job interview.

But Blarney’s had exceptionally cheap Long Island Iced Teas.

And there was karaoke.

I don’t recall what she sang that night. I was too infatuated by her “who would win in an animal fight” discussion, of which you could tell she clearly had deeply considered these outcomes already.

I do remember trying to decide what I was going to sing. I was clearly confident, fueled by a potent combination of Four Loko, Long Islands, and love.

But I needed something I knew I could nail in front of a crowd.

So I chose I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles).

For this girl, for this moment, it just felt right.

I did end up making it to my shoot the next morning. I couldn’t get the eye liner off my face that the girl talked me into applying later that evening, so you can clearly see it in the B-roll footage that I acted in.

She slept through that job interview. She seemed to not mind it too much, though, since she ended up marrying me.

This reminds me, I really aught to sing it to her again sometime soon.

It’s just hard to find date night opportunities with your wife when you’ve got two rambunctious kids running around.

That, and the karaoke scene here south of the river is sus. Find me a place nearby where I can do Rap God without censorship, you cowards.

I used to take a trip to the north shore with my extended family every summer.

When we’d arrive, my dad would hand me and my siblings a bunch of cash when we arrived accompanied by some variation of this speech: “This is it for the weekend. Spend it wisely.”

One year, my dad performed this ritual in front of the gas station which shared a parking lot with our hotel.

We went in to pick out some snacks, and behind the counter, I saw a cassette tape with a familiar sounding name:

”The Presidents of the United States of America”

A few weeks prior to our trip, back when school was in session, I recalled standing at the bus stop and hearing my friend Lucas telling everyone all about this band.

He said his older brother was into them. They sang about things like cats and peaches, and they totally rocked.

I had looked up to Lucas since preschool. He was effortlessly charismatic. Absolutely hysterical, too. He has this infectious laugh, often deployed after he cracks a joke.

Since I had the recommendation of the coolest kid I knew floating around somewhere in my head ¹, I figured I could parcel out a fifth of my weekend allowance to give it a shot.

I immediately fell in love with the record. I listened to it endlessly for months.

None of the lyrics really made sense to me as a kid. Lyrics have never been something I’ve considered much when it comes to music.²

But as an adult, I get so much joy from rediscovering music from my youth and enjoying the artistry with a renewed perspective that comes with age.

It was tough to only pick one song from this album. So many memories are intertwined with these songs as their accompaniment.

I used to sing Peaches every night to my daughter. Both Lump and Weird Al’s Forrest Gump-inspired cover of Lump often get stuck in my head, my thoughts seamlessly bouncing between lyric versions.

I picked Dune Buggy because it’s the second song from this band that I regularly make my kids listen to.

We have a family playlist filled with songs that each person gets to select, and Dune Buggy is the first song of mine which appears in order.

We will often go through the playlist in that order when we are in the car.

At first, the kids groaned every time the first guitar lick came on.

These days, you’ll occasionally catch my daughter singing loudly along.

And come on, what’s not to love about a blind spider barreling around the sand in a spider-sized dune buggy?

It only takes 5 snare hits and 5 tom hits to instantly transport me back to the warehouse where you go crashing through the window in the very first level of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater.

I spent so much time playing this game on the PlayStation. I wasn’t even particularly amazing at it. It was just fun to try and pull off the 900 again and again.

Recently, I learned that the N64 version of this game had to use abridged versions of all the songs on this soundtrack due to space limitations on the cartridges.

Amazing that we can now fit the entire contents of the Nintendo 64 library of games onto a 32GB SD card.¹

Ska is a genre of music I get embarrassed when I tell people I enjoy it. It is a genre for a specific brand of misfit. Think emo kids who aren’t overly emotional. Punk kids who aren’t anarchists.

I haven’t listened to much else by Goldfinger, but assumed that they would be playing this song toward the end of their set at When We Were Young.

Imagine my surprise when they called Tony Hawk onto stage before playing it.

Tony recalled the story of meeting the band and asking them to be part of the soundtrack. He said that he and Goldfinger grew up together and owe much of their success to their symbiotic relationship.

Then all of a sudden, the band starts playing the song, and Tony Hawk starts singing it!

There were several moments at When We Were Young where I would try to sing along to a song but couldn’t. I was overcome with emotion.

Seeing thousands of misfits singing this song in unison with the coolest misfit of them all on lead vocals? I couldn’t handle it.

Ska is fun. Ska is camp. Ska is dorky.

And I’m here for it.

As I climbed up on the table, the MRI technician handed me a laminated piece of paper and asked me what I want to listen to.

MRI machines are loud, so they provide you with a pair of headphones to wear while you lay as still as possible for around an hour.

It was six in the morning, early enough that I had to squint a bit to make out the SiriusXM channel listing.

My first instinct was to pick something that would make the technician laugh. I'm sure she was underpaid, overworked, and didn't want to be there any more than I did. The least I could do was try to get her to crack a smile.

I saw an EDM channel.

Perfect.

I ask her to throw that on.

I hear a chuckle through the low-quality speakers in the headphones. Mission accomplished.

As the test begins, my mind goes back to its default place of terrible thoughts. I am exhausted, I hate myself, I am a complete failure.

All of a sudden, I hear the following words:

I don't know who needs to hear this
We came here to get some healing
You can tell whoever's asking:
"Fuck, we're sad, but we're still dancing"

The swear word shocked me out of the funk for a moment.

The repetitive nature of EDM meant I got to keep hearing that chorus again and again.

After a few times, I hear another voice in my head:

"Sorry, can you please lay as still as possible?"

To this day, I've used this song as an anthem in the fight against my worst depressive thoughts.

It just sucks I can't really listen to it around the kiddos.

The algorithms¹ blessed me with this video last week, and I find myself coming back to it when I'm doing deep work.

I also am enjoying his Rammstein version, and I am eagerly looking forward to checking out the Linkin Park and Avenged Sevenfold ones soon.

If I could play the piano, this is absolutely the kind of stuff I would want to play.

I don't know if I'm one of the only weirdos that still uses Plex and listens to MP3s, but dammit, a carefully curated music collection of which I feel some ownership feels critically important to me.

I have started going back in and using the rating systems to rate entire albums.¹ Because this seems like a natural follow up question, I basically only give albums one of three ratings²:

• ★★★★☆ (4 stars): This is an important album to me, but I don't wanna hear it every day.
• ★★★★★ (5 stars): This album is everything right now.
• ★★★★⯨ (4.5 stars): Somewhere in between the two. It is either a 5 becoming a 4, or a 4 on its way to fivedom³.

Doing this gives me the ability to create a smart playlist containing all of the albums with at least a 4.5 star rating.

This morning while getting ready, I uncharacteristically grabbed my iPad and used Plexamp to listen to that playlist on shuffle.

The first thing I noticed on the much larger screen was how awful the album artwork looked for many of my albums.

They looked quite pixelated and blurry. Some of them looked like scans where you could clearly see stickers and thin, diagonal white lines on the sides.

I decided this must be something I rectify tonight.

I've updated the artwork for maybe 50 albums so far, and I'm stunned at how much of a difference it makes to have nice looking album art.

I've had some of these albums for decades now. When I added artwork back in the mid 2000s, the best I could hope for in many cases was a 256x256px JPG that I could find on a message board.

At the same time, the past few weeks gave me several opportunities to pay attention to these albums in a way I never have before.⁴

For most of my life, I generally used music to distract me from my thoughts. I would occasionally listen to the lyrics and look up the meaning of a song, but those details were often secondary to the overall feeling of a track.

Something in the past couple of years changed that in me, though, and now I have been enjoying music on so many more levels. What was an artist going through when they made a song? What was the creative process like? What do these words mean to the artist?

The best system I found was to use the Plex web app on my laptop to select new album art, and then use the Plexamp iOS app to move from song to song, finding songs which had low res album art.

I noticed after a few changes that when I saved the album art on my laptop, it instantly reflected on my phone.

So of course, I started hovering over the "save" button on my laptop, then glanced down at my phone while clicking.

And what you'd see was a cool cross fade where the image got sharper. Cleaner. Fresher. Way more detailed. Way less pixelated.

It allowed me to be a bit of an ophthalmologist, covering one eye, flipping between two different lens strengths and asking whether I preferred option 1 or option 2.

Polishing up my music collection, cleaning up this blog... these were things I used to do for fun.

They were mindless activities. A chance to express myself without feeling any judgement.⁵ To feel accomplished and organized, a little slice of order within a chaotic life filled with incessant disorder.

I have been so busy for the past twelve years that I forgot what fun really looked like.

I thought fun was learning how to build a company. To understand what it takes to build successful and impactful software.

And in many ways, those things were fun. It is really cool to make computers do complex stuff, to build tech that makes people's lives better. It brings me so much joy.

But that's not the only thing that's fun in the world. And I might have done a bit better at relegating those pursuits to my professional life, and then figured out a way to pursue other joyful things outside of that.

It's weird coming back to my media library after essentially neglecting it for most of my adult life. It feels like opening a time capsule, but then jumping down into it and living amongst the decade old cruft.

But it feels good to clean it out and use it again. To treat it like my house instead of a history exhibit.

We come into this world craving the presence of others. But a few modern trends—a sprawling built environment, the decline of church, social mobility that moves people away from friends and family—spread us out as adults in a way that invites disconnection. Meanwhile, as an evolutionary hangover from a more dangerous world, we are exquisitely engineered to pay attention to spectacle and catastrophe. But screens have replaced a chunk of our physical-world experience with a digital simulacrum that has enough spectacle and catastrophe to capture hours of our greedy attention. These devices so absorb us that it’s very difficult to engage with them and be present with other people.

The sum result of these trends is that we are both pushed and pulled toward a level of aloneness for which we are dysevolved and emotionally unprepared. Sartre said hell is other people. Perhaps. But the alternative is worse.

Ironically, this article was shared to me by one of the few people I see IRL nearly every week.

Paul, Micah, Nick, and I get together every Monday night and make music. It’s often the highlight of my week.

We get dinner beforehand and talk about the day to day goings on of our lives. Then, we retreat to Paul’s multi-million dollar recording studio ¹ and just noodle around.

We don’t have a set agenda, no prescribed musical style. One of us just starts playing something, and the rest of us join in.

No matter how depressed, anxious, or frustrated I feel walking into Paul’s house, I never leave with those feelings. Getting to spend time with three smart, talented, and caring dudes always leaves me with a filled bucket.²

Find an activity that brings you joy and go do it with other people. And if you don’t know where to find those people, just ask someone. That’s what Paul did, and thanks to him, I’ve now got two new friends and a weekly outlet for building my guitar skills and expressing some creativity.³

Ever since I entered into adulthood, I think that I’ve pretty much played by the rules. I sometimes try to present myself as anti-authoritarian, but I’ve come to understand that underneath that, I am someone who is very afraid of doing the wrong thing, everyone getting mad, and abandoning me.

The learning, or unlearning, or re-learning, of this year has been that I can make my own rules. And, inside that, I can also break my own rules. I make the rules, I can remake the rules, and I can do it as many times as I like. How liberating, am I right?

I’m finally checking out my pal Micah’s 2023 mix, and reading this explanation of his rules is super relatable.

I’ve always presented myself the complete opposite, though: extremely compliant and eager to follow the rules.

I’ve been trying to unlearn these habits over the past few years. It’s not so much a middle finger to the system; rather, it’s my way of posturing to others that I am willing to cooperate with you, but I’m not going to partake in unnecessary ceremonies anymore.

The spirit of this mix embodies a delightful way of rebelling against our own anxieties. And the fact that it is just barely askew from the rules makes it that much more lovely.

I am sorry, I am not willing to pay $97.58 for general admission at History, a Toronto club co-owned by Drake. Nor will I pay $446.25 for a seated ticket. The only time I would pay $446.25 is if I were taking a plane across the fucking ocean back to Sweden. 

Three thoughts:

1) I think I wanna take a trip to Sweden and see where both First Aid Kit and Jens Lekman grew up.

2) My wife and I have spent way too much money this year on concerts and shows. Here’s a list of performances I went to in the last three months of 2023 alone:

• When We Were Young festival in Las Vegas
• Audra McDonald
• Tool
• Frozen with the MN Orchestra
• The Grinch at Children’s Theatre
• Aladdin at the Orpheum
• Andrew McMahon
• The Nutcracker (okay, this was my neighbor’s daughter’s rendition of it, but still)
• Jinkx Monsoon and BenDeLaCreme’s Holiday Show
• OnStage 2023 at Rosemount High
• Peter Pan at the Ordway

I’m looking at my feed reader this evening and browsing through everybody’s year-end posts. If I’m honest, while it’s amazing to see how much hard work people have done this past year, they mostly make me feel like I’ve wasted my year.

But then I look at that list of shows I’ve seen in the past three months and feel a little bit better.

Most of those shows were seen with my kids.

The other ones were all seen with my wife (except the Tool show, which I got to see with my best buddy).

Even as I struggle personally right now with finding purpose in life, at least I can admit that I’m out there experiencing life and sharing it with those I love.

2024 is already shaping up to be a big year of experiences as well. There’s really no better time to appreciate life than the present, no?

3) Seriously, shame on Ticketmaster, Live Nation, and all the market forces that conspire to make shows unnecessarily expensive for the vast majority of people to attend. I’m insanely fortunate that I’m able to afford all that, but it still stings every time I fork over gobs of money just to feel the joy I get from seeing artists do what they do best.