Category Archives: Uncategorized

I hope everybody in Jersey City who makes art got the message loud and clear yesterday. Should you be naive enough to contract with the municipal government on a public project, the city reserves the right to alter your work without your consent. A citizen who finds your painting offensive can push the city to deface […]

To me, at least, the pick of these songs that David unearthed from 1997 is “Life By Starlight.” It’s exactly the sort of number I overvalue — midtempo, repetitive, diatonic, ominous, etc. — and I still dig that kind of thing. I can see why Scott Miller didn’t like it: it violates all the compositional […]

David Schreiber has been aiding a personal-archeological project of mine: he’s been digitally encoding discs of songs I sent him twenty years ago. I had no idea he even had them. I must have made them on my Tascam four-track and sent them to David in Florida. That’s way better than a time capsule. A […]

Were we cynical, I wonder, when we made those social-utility arguments for the arts in the mid-00s? Did we only make them because we believed that our political opponents understood nothing but dollars and cents? Our position on 111 First Street was that the arts center was a public good, and an early driver of […]

In many ways it’s relaxing to be a sideman: there are a million and one things the main performer is responsible for on the night of the show, and you’re off the hook for all of them. You head to the club, hang with your bandmates before you go on, get set up and choose your sounds, play, […]

Jim Testa was nice enough to profile me for the Journal this week, even though I don’t have anything new to share with people who like my music. He interviewed me to advance this weekend’s Parker Kindred benefit at Pianos. I’m doing a set with a rock group I’m calling the Contested Convention, which sounds fresh-ish, but […]

My first trip to 158 Ludlow Street had nothing to do with music. I went there to see a weird alt-theater performance that I remember zilch about. For a short time around the turn of the millennium, 158 Ludlow was kinda-sorta an underground playhouse, and our friend Brad, who’d founded the North American Cultural Laboratory in […]

it’s almost exam season, so hilary has gone to the poetry anthologies to scrounge up some end-of-semester verse. one of those anthologies i stole from my tenth grade english class, and i still have it on the shelf, with the names of my favorite poets (e. e. cummings, edna st. vincent millay, marianne moore) underlined in […]

Wednesday was a different thing altogether. Of the ten songs we ran at practice, I’d never played six of them, and I had no approach strategy for five of those six. I’d never seen the drummer before, and one of the guitarists was a guy I’d met briefly at shows but never made any music with — […]

I wasn’t surprised that it rained last night. It always rains on the night of an Overlord practice. Rain or snow or wind or some combination; whatever it is, I’m prepared to ride my bicycle through it. It never bothers me. I’ve come to see it as a solid metaphor for the adversity that Overlord has always had […]