Author Archives: tris

another links page! i’m mainly doing this because instagram doesn’t play well with outgoing links. also, instagram irritates me. i know: social media is a professional responsibility. still, i’d much rather have you come here. i am my own social network. anyway.  the calendar is about to turn to october, and the studio tour is […]

Friends, I trust you are coming to the Return to the Sugar Factory on Friday night at 8 p.m. But — perhaps you are wondering how to get to the new theater. In order to rock, is a trek into the mysterious, uncharted interior of Jersey City required? Fear not.  This is a very easy show to […]

Since outgoing links are difficult to include in an Instagram post, I’m just going to drop these here. For starters, you want to get a seat at our twentieth anniversary celebration of Shootout at the Sugar Factory, don’t you? I bet you do. It’s the first rock show at the new Art House Productions theater, […]

If you’ve attended services and done some wild worship in the club, you already know. Nevertheless it bears repeating like all good things do: everything you see and hear at a pop show derives from the African-American church. That means the rhythms, the arrangements, the hooks and melisma and harmonies, the cosmic stakes, the relationship between […]

Album I Listened To The Most In 2022 If you’re reading this, it’s likely that you know what kind of a year I had. If you’re reading this and you’re also aware of Abel Tesfaye and The Weeknd, you might wonder why I was messing around with Dawn FM at all. That couldn’t have been […]

Before we get to my singles list, I’ve got something I really want to clarify.  Very often — way too often — progressive rock will be described as “white” music; i.e., music defined by its estrangement from African-American traditions and the roots of culture as they are expressed in such institutions as the black church.  I’m ashamed […]

(Only on Jersey City Times and NJArts!) Hello, friends.  A tumultuous year is coming to an end, and that means it’s time for another Tris McCall Arts Annual.  You’re getting this because you’re involved in the arts, or you like the arts, or, for some odd reason, you like me.  In any case, thank you for being you.  I […]

The Pop Music Abstract is an annual exercise in automatic writing.  In the Abstract I attempt to write at the speed of thought about the subject that dominates my rambling internal monologue.  I go through the albums of the year in alphabetical order and I type the very first thing that enters my head.  I […]

Hello, my name is Tris, and I do not drive.  I have a license, but I don’t have a car.  I can operate one if I need to, but as a dweller in a pedestrian-intense area of an East Coast city, I’ve never deemed it wise to have four wheels. Two wheels, on the other […]