November 1, 2023

Let's Start at the Very Beginning

It is, and I have this on good authority, a very good place to start

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An Introduction of Sorts

Welcome to my newsletter. What is the point of this, you may ask? Well I’ll tell you. It’s entirely self-indulgent, but what isn’t?

I’ve been rolling around the idea of starting back up the ol’ music blog1 for a while. I hesitated in part because I’m oftentimes lazy, but more importantly, I didn’t think I have much to add to the discourse that other people are already doing better than I could. (shout out in particular to folks like Listen Up, Nerds and Step One of a Plan) But I still have an itch to yell into the void about stuff! Showing my age, I miss LiveJournal.

And then, this past week, I became a dad.

So this little slice of the internet is going to be a place where I talk equally about our lives, and about media that interests me and I want to share. Let’s be honest, it’s mostly going to be music. Things are gonna be rambly, and only slightly edited. I cut my teeth at LJ, and I have learned nothing in the intervening years.

One ground rule: Despite the fact that I imagine most people reading this will be friends and family, I’m going to keep names out of this, and I won’t be sharing pictures of our kid. If you want those, you know how to reach me.

The First Week

Like most new parents, I have absolutely no idea what I am doing. Sure, I’ve done the reading (What to Expect…, The Expectant Father, skimmedgotten the highlights of Expecting Better from my wife, etc.) and gotten loads of advice from the parents in our lives. But while confident I could pass the written exam, the practical portion is proving to throw a lot of that out the window.

Thankfully my wife has already proven to be an incredible mother and caretaker, and I think we’re going to be good parents. The kid seems happy and healthy. The cats have smelled its large baby head and determined that yes, the new hairless being is not a threat and can stay.

There’s still a lot, obviously. This is just one week of a life-long journey. I think we’re starting on the right foot, though. Everything they say is true; sleeping becomes a special treat rather than a given, you’re beholden to the whims of a tiny creature who has no ability to communicate aside from raging screams, and you never seem to stop changing diapers.

And I’m already loving it all.

They say that becoming a parent changes you. Many of my friends told me that as we approached our due date. It’s not that I didn’t believe them, I did. I saw it in so many people. If anything, I worried I’d be some case where I didn’t fall in love with my child. The literature, of course, talks about this and how it’s more normal than The Media would make you think, but I’ve spent the past 40 years being bombarded with ideas about how parenthood should be, and there still so much to unpack and unlearn. Still, the worry was there.

This turned out to be unfounded. When I saw our child, I burst into joyous tears. My lizard brain immediately thought “I would fight a bear for this tiny being.”

What’s Playing

So as a Punk Of A Certain Age, just the idea of a new album from The Gaslight Anthem conjured a lot of feelings. Primarily apprehension and uncertainty; Get Hurt, in a word, sucked, and what were the odds they could recapture any of the old magic?

Readers, I tell you I have been pleasantly surprised!

Now let’s establish that “pleasantly surprised” isn’t exactly high praise. I expected this album to be a disaster, an embarrassment, a final sullying of the goodwill and reputation they established with Sink or Swim and The ‘59 Sound. The post-hiatus comeback album? Tricky business, that.

Thankfully, it mostly works. It helps that Brian Fallon has been a very consistent songwriter; aside from no longer singing about girls named Maria/Mary/Virginia and dropping whole lyrics of his favorite songs into things, his writing style and tropes have been set since at least his time in This Charming Man. Not to say he hasn’t grown, but the core structures remain the same.

History Books is an appropriate name for this record, since it reads like a history of Brian’s music, not just with Gaslight, but his one-off side project The Horrible Crowes (underrated), and his post-Gaslight solo material. Could these songs all have been a follow up to Local Honey? Lyrically, probably. But it’s nice to have the Benny and the Alexes back at it.

Of course it doesn’t all work. The title track, the moment this band was always shooting for, a song featuring the patron saint of New Jersey himself, would probably be better without his inclusion. Bruce sounds lethargic on his verse. And the squelching post-grunge guitars of “I Live In the Room Above Her” bring back unpleasant memories of Get Hurt.

History Books is probably the best comeback album we could hope for. It doesn’t tarnish the band’s legacy, but it doesn’t approach the highs of their early peak. Instead, it sits squarely in the middle: a perfectly fine record. Some of these are gonna be solid additions to the live set; I had the opportunity to see the band at Avail’s Over the James festival this past summer, and despite a weather-shortened set2, they brought out “Positive Charge” and it was fun. I will almost certainly be picking up a copy from Celebrated Summer in the near future.

Here’s To The Future

I’m not planning on any sort of regular schedule here, for what it’s worth. When the mood strikes me. I’ll endeavor not to make it too frequent. Hopefully you’ll stick around.

Drop me a line or leave a comment, if that’s your thing.