(That’s What I Like About) Baltimore

You might recognize this one. Unlike most of the rest of the songs in this Almanac, it wasn’t written in 2015 or 2016. “(That’s What I Like About) Baltimore” dates back to late 2008, and it’s been performed a few times by a couple of different combos.It’s possible you heard it at a show and, […]

Kate Beaton

The decision to do the Almanac was mainly driven by webcomic envy. It feels like the ideal way to tell a story: episodically, a page a day, on a regular update schedule. The Pittsburgh song I’m posting today doesn’t have anything to do with Kate Beaton, but I’m dropping her name here in tribute, and […]

Route 52

In Ecology Of Fear, Mike Davis writes about our national obsession with West Coast apocalypse. Filmed depictions of Pacific disaster are big entertainment for the whole country. If the earthquakes don’t get Southern California, it’ll be the landslides, or the tornadoes (Los Angeles is weirdly prone to them, he suggests), or a tsunami, or a […]

The Prince Of Daylight

When I was a young music fan learning about rock history, most of what I loved was called pretentious by the music press. This bothered me. Close To The Edge?, that had to have been received as a masterpiece, no? The consensus said it hadn’t, and wasn’t. According to the Rolling Stone Record Guide, it […]

Take Me To The Waterfall

Like many Americans with a taste for eschatology, I read Kathryn Schulz’s article on the Very Big One with interest. Schulz wrote the story of the Cascadia subduction zone earthquake like a mystery thriller, which, in a way, it is, even if nobody ever really believed in Seattle’s geological stability. Naturally, seismologists, public health officials, […]

Conspiracy Theory

So I came up with this song — the Denver number — around the same time I wrote this essay. Sometimes I’ll write something and it’ll get love and affection; other times, even my friends just pass it by. I figured that the Conspiracy! essay would be a popular one. For whatever reason, I was […]

An Almanac opens

Hi, I’m Tris McCall. For the past two years, I’ve been discovering America. Today I’m ready to begin sharing what I’ve found there. And since all American projects deserve a nice gonzo American user interface, we’ve designed a website called McCall’s Almanac that will work asa conduit for my reflections. Imagine something not unlike the […]

Critics Poll 27 — My ballot, part 2

Song Of The Year Since William Godwin, the social-problem novel has had several periods of vogue: the early Industrial Revolution, World War I and its aftermath, the White Shadow 1970s, etc. Its central premise — that a reader can emerge from her encounter with a work of art with her compassion for the downtrodden enhanced […]