A Year of Blind Spots: The Dreaming

Joe is working through a list of albums that he considers "blind spots," i.e. albums that he's never heard but feels like he should.

Yes, okay, sometimes you can appreciate the intention of the art without actually liking the art itself. Sure, yes, we know this. But sometimes that's not good enough for me. Just because something is weird as fuck doesn't mean I can't try my best to meet the art where it's coming from. With Kate Bush, I have seen firsthand twice now, it is incredibly arduous to meet the art where it's coming from, because it's bizarre and strange in a few different ways, and anything but approachable. But as I've seen with The Dreaming, the effort is mostly worth it.

I am familiar with Hounds of Love. I have been since before A Year of Blind Spots was conceived, but it was definitely a glaring Blind Spot at one point in the mid-'10s. I will say that I have never had a problem with Kate Bush being certifiably "weird." I like weird. My issues with her most critically acclaimed album have nothing to do with its weirdness, but instead with a complete lack of hooks on Side 2 (the "Ninth Wave" suite that comprises the entire side, and doesn't do much for me in terms of their being any actual good songs). The Dreaming, which is the album that came out before Hounds of Love, manages to hold it together for the entire length of the album, with interesting songs with good (weird) hooks, and nothing that devolves into the type of artistry that affects the strength of the songwriting.

I was also familiar with Hounds of Love before its most famous song tripled its fame through its use in the dumb Netflix alien show. I hated that show, watched the first three seasons, was skeptical during the first season and fucking despised the second and third (my fandom of Maya Hawke notwithstanding). I didn't make it to the season that apparently features heavily "Running up That Hill," so we don't have to worry about shit-ass lazy-ass alien monster pastiches mucking up my appreciation for that song. For what it's worth, I think that this is the second-best song on Hounds of Love, after "The Big Sky." The Kate Bush heads seem to push for "Cloudbusting." All this just tells me that the true opinion within the comparison of these two albums is that Hounds of Love's peaks are higher, but the nadirs are lower, whereas The Dreaming is consistently stranger also strangely more consistent. Like, there's no song as big or as good as "Running up That Hill" on here, but I'd rather listen to The Dreaming in full over Hounds of Love in full every single time.

There's something appealing about Kate Bush's brand of weirdness too, and it's not something that I really thought about until I left the confines of Hounds of Love. I love the intense mix of weird futuristic shit and the sense of outdatedness that most of it has. It feels like the sounds weren't intended to age graceful but did so anyway. Listen to "Sat in Your Lap," and immediately be perplexed by the synths hits over top of the pounding drums. They seem out of place, but because everything feels out of place, it somehow works. There is so much, like, growling and yelling and weird disparate vocalizations all over this thing. Listen to "Houdini" as a good example. What the hell is even going on here? What's happening is Kate Bush going balls to the wall in making evocative art, even within the context of an otherwise dramatic love ballad.

You ever watch some of the videos for this thing? My iPod is still broken, so I've seen a few on YouTube, and they are absolutely wild. They are almost kitschy, but like I said, it feels like they almost immediately aged well. The title track is the craziest example. The song is all tribal beats and falsetto chanting, and the video is, uh, Bush dressed like an alien, dancing with other aliens? But it's not supposed to feel realistic, it's supposed to look like Kate Bush dressed like an alien on a soundstage. At one point, she finds an alien with a penis made of laser beams and jerks it off? That's my interpretation, anyway. I find it all very charming. I cannot imagine, especially after the whole "Running up That Hill" thing, that anyone could possibly feel any differently about Kate Bush. It's silly and funny and fun as fuck. She's a weirdo theater kid with a huge budget, that's all. I love this shit.

I wondered for a little bit if there was another Kate Bush album out there that had perhaps an even better balance of weirdo art energy and sharp songwriting. Then I realized two things. First, that if there was, then it would already be more popular than Hounds of Love, so I think we can safely rule the possibility out. Second, that if there was, I don't know if I would necessarily have the energy to seek it out just yet. The Dreaming was deep and intense and it took a lot out of me. This isn't easy breezy pop music. I'm not saying it's better and I'm not saying it's worse, just a different experience. And if there was a chance that, for example, her debut album The Kick Inside was less weird and way catchier, then in all likelihood, I'd listen to it and be tempted to say something like "this is my favorite Kate Bush album so far." And maybe that's true. However, I also think that this would be me playing into my worst impulses, i.e. laziness.

It's easier to like some albums and harder to like other albums. The Dreaming was hard to like, but I listened, and listened, and I have found a way to love it. And the fact that Kate Bush made it hard for me is the part that's important, and interesting. My appreciation for this album feels earned. I saw an article of the author's Top Ten Kate Bush Songs, and someone in the comments said "I would nominate for this list every song from The Dreaming," and someone else responded, "I just listened to The Dreaming for the first time, and I'm never taking a recommendation from you again." This is the whole of that classic music conversation, in miniature. You can either listen a lot and love it, or listen once and hate it. The longer it takes you to love something, the more frustrating it becomes, but the more worthy becomes the reward at the end.

I would not blame you if you don't like this album. But it feels pretty good to like it. Only because it's fucking WEIRD.

In My Place 209

July 28, 2026. 40.073, -75.06934. See the updated map here. See all the blog posts here.

It's a stupid picture because you can't see the horse, but if the lighting was better you'd see a horse. Maybe for the best you can't see Tina; I would feel weird passing a picture of someone else's pet. It's not our pet, Tina the horse, though of you asked my kids they might say something different. She is our closest neighbor, and certainly the only neighbor that we can see sleeping when we look out our bedroom windows. She was also the first neighbor we met when we moved in. Her birthday is in my calendar. There is a feeling of comfort knowing that Tina the horse has been a constant presence for the last six years. Especially since the other neighborhood animal, Tré the three-legged cat, recently moved, and we haven't broken the news to the kids yet. There's Tina, though. She's still there, don't let the photography fool you.

Never Seen It #325: The Notebook

I am no one special. Just a common blogger with common thoughts. I've led a common life. There are no monuments dedicated to me, and my name will soon be forgotten, but in one respect I've succeeded as gloriously as anyone who ever lived. I've watched 500 movies I've never seen before, and for me, that has always been enough.

The Notebook

2004

Nick Cassavetes

The memory I have is in a friend's basement, and The Notebook is on. The friend was female (platonic). There were other female friends (platonic) there. I may have been the only guy, I forget. It was a snow day, and we had been sledding, and now we were getting warm and dry and sipping hot cocoa. My friends put on The Notebook. This was done on purpose, a winking nod to the fact that I did not want to watch The Notebook. It was a whole thing. I assume that the pretense of my not wanting to watch The Notebook was based along gender lines. I was a boy and thus The Notebook was not to be my type of movie. It was mutually understood. I didn't want to watch it. I wasn't interested in a cheesy love story.

I was also a teenager. I was young and dumb and didn't know shit about the world and didn't care. I knew nothing about love, and The Notebook, had I watched it back then, would've landed with a heavy thud upon my green, untested heart. So my women friends assuming that it was "not my kind of movie" back in the mid-'00s were absolutely right. It wasn't then. But that was 20 years ago. I've lived through some shit since then. I have a much better understand of what love is now. I'm not saying that I think The Notebook is a great movie because of that. It's fine, it's not great, but it's a fine, pretty good movie. I do think, however, that I appreciate The Notebook for what it is, at this age, better than I ever could have when I was an idiot teenager.

That's probably the case for all movies, right? But here, I'm talking about romance dramas specifically. If the point of The Notebook is to make the case for following your heart in the direction of true love, then that becomes the specific reason that I could only like this movie now, and not then. I have known true love, I live with it each day, and I am motivated now to want that for the protagonists of a film that I am enjoying. Even if the story is fictional. Even if the movie is kinda cliché, as these movies sometimes are. I understand it now, and that makes all the difference.

I was wondering, though: would I have liked this movie even more if I hadn't known the narrative conceit of the senior citizens in the framing device being older versions of the main characters? Was this supposed to be a secret? I don't know. I knew from the beginning, I suppose because this was explained to me smirkingly in that snow day basement of yore. I could imagine a scenario in which I suddenly snap to attention that Duke is actually old person Noah and he's chatting with old person Ali with dementia, and maybe that elevates the film even more.

But I don't even know if that was ever the intention of the film. Maybe it would have been obvious from the very beginning, whether I knew anything about The Notebook prior to or not. Like maybe the creators of this film predicted its cultural ubiquity and didn't even bother with any sort of surprise. Not to mention the fact that this was a book beforehand. That's what Pam told me when I asked her. She said that she has seen this movie many times, and that she had read the book before the movie even came out.

I wonder if she's seen it at any point in the last sixteen years, i.e. in the time since we fell in love with each other. To be clear, I'm not saying that you need to experience any movie's characters' motivations and emotions for yourself before you can ever truly understand them. That's not the case at all, never has been. Movies can show you things that you'll never know for yourself, or simply haven't yet. I remember getting fucked up watching Forgetting Sarah Marshall after a tough breakup, for example. I didn't know what love was, even though Jason Segel's character gradually learns what love is throughout that movie.

Interesting that I was more invested in a rom-com (with Sarah Marshall leaning heavily toward the "com" side, but still), and yet in the same timeframe could never picture myself being invested in a rom-dram (is that a thing?). But see, this doesn't have anything to do with the subject matter of love and my inexperience with it. It has everything to do with what kind of movies I can appreciate and which I can't. I'm saying now that being intimately familiar with love and the joy and pain that comes along with undying love is the thing that makes me able to tolerate The Notebook in the first place.

Otherwise, it's a pretty cheesy movie! It hits a lot of the same beats that your typical schmaltzy love story would hit. It was interesting that they papered over the apparent fact that our star-crossed lovers fought constantly. Also interesting that the "other guy" was by all accounts a really good dude, and was only saddled with the fatal flaw of not being The One. The Notebook either did not do enough to distinguish itself from the tried-and-true romance drama formula, or has become ubiquitous enough in pop culture that it feels unoriginal only because it inspired so many knockoffs.

At the end of the day, though, I liked this movie, because I love love, and I know it well. Eighteen-year-old Joe could fucking never.

GRADE: 3.5 pukes out of 5

NEXT TIME: Everyone has AIDS in RENT.

In My Place 208

July 27, 2026. 40.02388, -75.07766. See the updated map here. See all the blog posts here. The photos continue to look like shit on Blogger, click to see a better version.

I can see it in my mind: the rain beginning, then picking up speed, the hail falling sharply, the winds blowing, the lightning cracking; the tree falling at the exact angle so as to block the train tracks; a train stopping completely before crashing, stopping safely, no harm, except for the inconvenience; the radio signal back to the station, the rerouting of various train routes, the stupid decision to send one particular train down a different track, nonsensical as it is.

I can see it through my own eyes: the number for "minutes left" turn from green to orange to red; the young employee, cheerful, smiling, announcing my doom; the internal clock on the worst day of work jump up a full out; my body sagging as I slink toward an alternate mode of transportation; the rain pelting the subway car as it hits the open air and brings me toward the station crowded with the hoi polloi, all of us coming home from work, exhausted, defeated, despaired.

Tramps like Us: Working on a Dream

A complete run-through of Bruce Springsteen's discography, written every once in a while by Joe.

I don't like being one in a crowd. I don't like the idea of thinking the same way as everyone else. If I'm going to spend a non-negligible amount of time typing about the subject of Bruce Springsteen on this blog, then I want it to be worth it. I want to present to you some fresh ideas. I don't want to just regurgitate the same things that other (and, let's be real, more qualified) sources have already told you on the vast pages of the internet. What the hell would be the point of that?

That's probably why I find myself making such statements as "I like Magic almost as much as I like Born to Run." On the one hand, that's true, I really did enjoy that album, and felt that special feeling within my heart while listening to it, and that feeling was comparable to the early days of listening to Springsteen's early classics, a feeling that basically boils down to: fuck, dude, music is fucking AWESOME. On the other hand, I can feel myself straining to make outrageous claims, something that your typical Springsteen fan or even Springsteen skeptic is gonna come in contact with and stop and be like, hold up, what the fuck is this guy saying now?

But this is Bruce Springsteen we're talking about. His bonafides have been long established. He released classics that established him as a force in rock 'n' roll, he got over his rocky period to enter a legacy period later in life, and he continued to release more-than-worthy albums well into that legacy period. Saying that you like Bruce Springsteen would not be an outrageous thing to say, based on the evidence that his music is extremely likeable. Saying that you don't like Bruce Springsteen would be outrageous, sure, but you know I'm not approaching it from that angle, because I'm writing a goddamn blog column about him, and that's not something you do for an artist who sucks.

Now, the point of doing this column one album at a time is to track the ebbs and flows of the discography. He might be a great artist but not every single piece of art is going to be great. There are going to be missteps and outright failures along the way. To me, it's interesting to take what is considered an artist's worst album—e.g. in this case might be Human Touch—and then consider the ways in which that album might be considered, at the very least, interesting. Even if what's interesting about it is that it's bad but not as bad as people say. I think that's okay, to think about it that way, and I think it's a good way to keep the joy in the act of listening.

The thing about Human Touch (and Lucky Town to a lesser extent, and maybe even The Ghost of Tom Joad too) is that I was aware that they had a less-than-stellar reputation. I wasn't expecting to listen to Human Touch and find something revelatory, I wasn't expecting to love it. My expectations were appropriately set, and I walked away from those experiences with an appreciation for those albums, even though, sure, okay, they weren't the best thing this dude has ever made.

When I say that I didn't like Working on a Dream, well, that's something completely different. I wasn't expecting to dislike it. I liked The Rising a lot and I liked Magic a lot, and Little Steven Van Zandt has said that those two albums and Working on a Dream completed a trilogy of music. On top of that (and spoilers for next time!), I've known Wrecking Ball since it came out and have liked it a lot the whole time since. So my expectation was that I would like Working on a Dream. I was... disappointed. I think there is still some good stuff in here, but I think overall, this is the most disappointed I've been in an album throughout this entire project. It's all about expectations, I know, but still!

Okay, so we'll get to the Why of my opinion in a minute, but I'm talking about expectations first, and I'm talking about expectations specifically for this blog project. Those expectations include the idea that I should be saying something different. And if that's the case, then okay, we can work with a bad album. What if I don't like Working on a Dream, but I'm the only one? That would be interesting. I could explain my thought process, and compare that to the rest of the Springsteen fans, and if those are different, then that becomes the crux of the blog post.

So the second layer of disappointment comes when I discover that, whoops, Working on a Dream is actually considered his worst album of this '00s revival time period by almost everyone. That automatically makes my opinions less exciting. Which is fine. Sometimes universal opinions are right, or, like, sometimes millions of people can't be wrong, ya know? There's always a chance that the next generation could reevaluate something, but I don't think we're quite there with Springsteen's post-9/11 output just yet. And so I'm stuck firmly with everyone in my own generation who has evaluated this album of music and said: ehhhhhhhh, it's fine, at best.

Time to talk about my sources, briefly. Because that's important too. If my only source was, say, Rolling Stone, then we might be getting a different impression here. Rolling Stone gave Working on a Dream five out of five stars in their contemporaneous review, which, I mean... talk about different generations, right? Holy moly. In any case, I looked to two sources for the millennial take on this work. The first is something that I've used as a source throughout this entire process so far, and will be able to for at most two more weeks—Stereogum's ranking of every Springsteen album, as of 2013. This was written by Ryan Leas (I'm pretty sure, though I'm noticing today that the byline just says "Stereogum" now, for some reason). Leas is about five years older than I am, and firmly a millennial. He has Working on a Dream as the third-worst, after the aforementioned Human Touch / Lucky Town combo. The second source is RateYourMusic, where I'm probably five years older than your average user, but still mostly millennial I'd guess. They have Working on a Dream as the second worst (Lucky Town beats it by 0.05 average points).

Okay, so this isn't a secret, that Working on a Dream isn't the best Springsteen album. It's still kinda weird, though. Why? Why is there a stinker here, in the middle of what is otherwise a pretty great run? After Wrecking Ball, we'll have covered a ten-year period in which Springsteen released six albums, and, in my documented opinion, five of them are fucking great. And it's not like Springsteen took a big swing and simply missed with this album. It has the same producer as The Rising and Magic, and has the same production quality. It has the same players. Like we discussed last time with Magic, this album too finds Bruce Springsteen once again being "serious" as opposed to "fun," which can be fun sometimes anyway, but is not fun here. Why?!

One theory I don't know if I buy is that Working on a Dream is about the good times of the Obama years, which felt toothless compared to The Rising (about the horrors of 9/11), Magic (about the horrors of a completely unnecessary war overseas), and Wrecking Ball (about the horrors of capitalistic pigs gutting our nation). I don't know if I buy it because we have seen, before this '00s span of albums, and now after them, that Springsteen doesn't need a "horror" to combat via music. The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle is about good times. Letter to You (spoilers) is about thinking about those good times. If Springsteen wants to spend the last couple years of the aughts singing about Outlaw Pete while our first Black president kicks ass, then that doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the quality of the work.

Here's my theory. I don't know if it's true (and we're going to have to touch back to this theory when we get to Only the Strong Survive, since Springsteen makes the theory explicit on that one), but it's a hunch that I'm getting, and only because this is something that I'm noticing for the first time on here, and for the first time found it a little grating. My theory is that Springsteen, during his legacy period, kept working on himself, kept trying to improve his craft, and for whatever reason before Working on a Dream got it into his head that he needed to improve his vocals. When he was younger, Springsteen's untrained voice and untamed energy hid the fact that he wasn't the world's best singer, because it didn't fucking matter! This was Springsteen! His voice was his own! On Working on a Dream, however, he's really going for it. He's singing like he got lessons on how to sing. Listen to "Kingdom of Days" and tell me that vibrato isn't a fucking put-on.

It's not on every song, but on some, and that's what makes the difference for me. Of course, on the songs where he's all gruff and occasionally off-key and getting by on pure cockiness, not even those songs always hold up. So maybe it's a bunk theory that I'm presenting here, I don't know. Maybe it's just that the songwriting was subpar on this album, for whatever reason. Look at "Outlaw Pete," the opening song that's for some fucking reason stretched to eight minutes long. This might be my least favorite song on the album, but I don't get the sense that Springsteen is doing any "I'm a studied vocalist now" thing on it. I just think it's stupid. "Outlaw Pete, can you hear me?" is a lazy-ass chorus, and it becomes a parody in the back half when it's slowed and stretched. It's just not good songwriting.

Then I go on RYM and I see multiple reviews that were like "the song 'Outlaw Pete' is the only good song." What?! Could be because it's the first song, but it could also be that Springsteen is at least singing from the heart and not the trained vocal cords. It's a dumb fucking song but at least it's passionately dumb, right? If I was trying to like "Outlaw Pete" (not gonna happen, I'm speaking hypothetically), then maybe it would be beneficial to compare it to "Queen of the Supermarket," which is songwriting almost as bad, with the singing that grates me. I'm afraid to look it up, but this is probably considered Springsteen's worst song, right? At least in the bottom five?

Even considering everything that's wrong with this album, and even spotlighting the worst songs, and I can't bring myself to say that Working on a Dream is a BAD album. It's flawed, and it's bad compared to what's come before it, but it's actually, at worst, a pretty alright album. I think "Good Eye" is strange and fun and feels like it could've taken Devils & Dust in a different direction if it existed back then. I think that "Surprise, Surprise" has a chorus dumber than the chorus on "Outlaw Pete" and yet ended up being the chorus that was stuck in my head after every spin of the album. "My Lucky Day" is often lauded as the best song on the album, and it's got heart in it for sure. (You should note too that I don't fuck with bonus tracks, so I can't speak to the claim that "The Wrestler" is any good, let alone the best on this album, since it's not on this album.)

I was disappointed in listening to Working on a Dream, but I do think that this was an instructive experience overall. I was getting too worked up over the fact that Springsteen doesn't release stinkers. He does, of course. He is human. He's not perfect. It's important to remember that, I think. This shouldn't be a worship column. I need to keep both feet on the ground. There is so much great music to be found throughout this dude's discography, but that fact becomes meaningless if it's all great. There needs to be some not-great music to compare it too. We need something like Working on a Dream, to keep our heads level and our wits about us.

Song for the "Tramps like Us" mixtape: "Surprise, Surprise"

Stream the whole album below:

In My Place 207

July 26, 2026. 40.17986, -75.53935. See the updated map here. See all the blog posts here.

A beautiful park in the suburbs, a beautiful day for a first birthday party, great people, great weather, but holy SHIT you shoulda seen that porta potty, goddamn, you wanna know how fucking hard it is to get three young daughters to piss or shit anywhere besides their own home porcelain? And now you're gonna ask 'em to fold up toilet paper to cover up toilet lid shit stains in a plastic box that's been roasting in the sun and let 'em piss on a pile of shit that's been building into a small mountain in the formerly blue subterranean liquid pool of filth below them? We left the party for five minutes so they could instead attempt to piss in a bucket that we had in the minivan trunk, and if that's the alternative, then you can just fucking imagine what the original plan looked like, jesus fucking christ. Other than that, a beautiful day, I really enjoyed it.

Album of the Week: The Medicine

I'm not gonna go crazy asking you to vote for the RC summer album, because I don't have it in me. But if you have a moment, and haven't already, you should vote. It'll take 30 seconds. Please and thank you. Enjoy the music this week!

Record Club:

archives | supplemental

spotify playlist | youtube playlist

choose | writing

WEEK 391 — July 26-August 1, 2026

The Medicine

by the Jazz June

LISTEN:

Spotify | YouTube | Bandcamp | Apple

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PICKED BY VOTE

CATEGORY OF VOTING: "Ring a Bell" — These are the albums that have the same title as previously covered RC albums. Basically, I'm scrolling down the list of past albums, and I'm trying to pick out some of the titles that have a more common name, and then searching for that name on RYM. That's how we got The Medicine, which is the same name as the album by Jeremy Renner. The funny part is, I think The Medicine by the Jazz June was the only pick out of the five albums here that is actually more popular and/or well-known than the RC album we originally covered (the album itself, not the artist, only because no one knows that Jeremy Renner made an EP besides us).

LOSING ALBUMS: But actually, The Medicine did not originally win the poll. That would be Fine Art by a band called Fine Art, whose self-titled shares an album name as the one we did with Kneecap. But a couple weeks ago, I got an email from our PoYB Contributor Tom, who informed me that Fine Art wasn't available online. The easiest solution is to just go with the second place album. And these two really were neck-and-neck for a while. The other three got wiped out—Healing by Todd Rundgren (same as In Love with a Ghost), Punk by Patricia Taxxon (same as CHAI and same as Young Thug), and Loaded by Brotha Lynch Hung (same as the Velvet Underground). The latter got zero votes, and hopefully that was on purpose, and not coincidental, because it proves once again that y'all know what you're doing; I didn't realize that Brotha Lynch Hung was basically a shock-rapper, and I'm glad we don't have to grapple with the subject matter he raps about this week.

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ALBUM DETAILS

GENRE: Midwest emo, post-hardcore, math rock

RELEASED: 2000 (unknown exact date)

LENGTH: 56:09

TRACKLIST:

1. Viva la Speed Metal
2. The Scars to Prove It
3. Excerpt
4. The Phone Works Both Ways
5. The Medicine
6. At the Artist's Leisure Part 2
7. Motorhead's Roadie
8. Death from Above
9. Fight like Sinatra
10. Get on the Bus
11. Balance

LYRICS: Genius.com

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ARTIST DETAILS

PRONOUNS: n/a

ABOUT: The members of the Jazz June all went to Kutztown University, and in 1996, they formed a band. Wikipedia is unclear about who was originally in the band, but I think it's Andrew Low (vocals, guitar), Bryan Gassler (guitar), Nat Duncan (bass), and Justin Max (drums). But Duncan left after the first album, and was replaced by Daniel O'Neill. Other members listed are Adam Gerhart (unknown what he played) and Tim Holland (guitar, trumpet, keyboards). The band was known for taking hardcore emo sounds and adding a healthy bit of experimentation to it. They broke up in 2003, after their third album, but reunited in 2006 for a benefit show, and in 2014 for a fourth and (as of now) final album. "Jazz june" is a phrase used in "We Real Cool," a 1959 poem by Gwendolyn Brooks. 

DISCOGRAPHY: This is the Jazz June's second of four studio albums. The first is 1997's They Love Those Who Make the Music. The third was 2002's Better Off Without Air. The most recent is 2014's After the Earthquake. They also released an outtakes compilation in 2007 called The Scars to Prove it. There are also two EPs.

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ADDITIONAL INFO

READING SOME SHIT: a 2014 oral history of the band via Vice

WATCHING SOME SHIT: the title track live in 2013

RECORD CLUB CONNECTIONS: The strongest connection was already mentioned at the top—we've already covered The Medicine by Jeremy Renner. Hey, did you know that in late 2025, Jeremy Renner was credibly accused of sex abuse? And that he threatened to call ICE on the victim when she attempted to confront him about the abuse? Just leaving this information here, in case you need it.

This album was rated as the 33rd-best emo album of all time by Rolling Stone. Other RC alumni featured on the list: Coheed and Cambria (#35), Paramore (#28), Weezer (#14!), Thursday (Full Collapse at #11), My Chemical Romance (#10), Fall Out Boy (From Under the Cork Tree at #9), and Sunny Day Real Estate (#1). We didn't cover that #1-ranked Sunny Day Real Estate album in RC, but I would probably point to the RC album as the closest match to the Jazz June, in terms of the Midwest emo sound and genre.

MENTIONS ON THE BLOG: None, but I thought there was going to be. For Summer Song Challenge Day 6, I chose a song from a compilation called Kickstart Audio Presents: Pennsylvania, USA Volume One. I thought for sure the Jazz June was going to be on that compilation, being from Kutztown, but no such luck.

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RECORD CLUB ALUMNI ASSOCIATION

This week's discography dive album: unhammerlike by Fibulator

This week's follow-up album: Unclouded by Melody's Echo Chamber

This week's keeping up album (probably): Everything I Ever Saw by the Menzingers

Listen with us! Keep your favorite Record Club artists in the rotation!

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COUNTDOWN:

69 Weeks Until Week 420

We are tracking and counting down every week from here on out till Record Club Week 420. We started this countdown 69 weeks out. During Record Club Week 420, we will be covering Donny Most by the esteemed Happy Days virgin Donny Most. The goal for Week 420 of Record Club is that it will feature 69 reviews from 69 different people. 

THIS WEEK: We are 29 weeks away from Week 420.

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Happy listening, RC family!
Have a great week!

In My Place 206

July 25, 2026. 40.0997, -75.02314. See the updated map here. See all the blog posts here.

My entire weekend has been in flux, plans coming together and falling apart due to external factors beyond my control. That's okay. It actually reminds me a little bit of college, when you'd be getting out of your last Friday class and start texting people and you wouldn't really know what the plan was until something sudden crashed onto your or your friend's phone and you or your friend's eyes would light up like, oh shit, here it is, the plan! And then you'd leave and it would be a legendary night. As of this writing, my night is still up in the air. The day was locked in pretty tightly, though. We're leaving for the shore in seven days and the next six days are all booked solid, no time to hit the wholesaler before then, gotta be today, gotta nab those pallets of seltzers and boxes of bags of Doritos. We did the only thing we had to do, and then I moved into the unknown.

Record Club Alumni Association — Minutes from Meeting #07: Gal Costa, Willie Nelson, the Rolling Stones

(Deeper Dive)

Gal Costa

Gal Costa — RC Week 167 — 3 pukes out of 5

Gal

1969 (exact date unknown)

Holy shit, this is nuts. And the fact that it was nuts was... well, not totally unexpected, but at least mostly unexpected, right? Gal Costa was pleasant music that trended toward "oldies" in a non-American way. Tropicália is a genre that you don't really think of as "progressive" in any way. But there were cracks in Gal Costa where the weird poked through. Gal, the follow-up, takes that weird and blows it up to widescreen. The entire thing is weird. Weird, and fascinating, and ballsy, and wild. This is dense psychedelia, and Gal Costa full transforms herself to meet the need that this music requires. She's out here wailing over musique concrète basically. I wonder what RC would've made of Gal Costa if this is where we met her. I personally would've been perplexed and maybe a little tired. But having Gal Costa in my life for five years now and then diving into something that completely smashes my image of her? Not tired at all. I am reinvigorated. Gal Costa is a fucking BADASS. What in the fuck is even happening here.

GRADE: 4 pukes out of 5

(Follow-up)

Willie Nelson

Red Headed Stranger — RC Week 318 — 3 pukes out of 5

Oh What a Beautiful World — RC f/u #50 — 3 pukes out of 5

Workin' Man: Willie Sings Merle

November 7, 2025

I'm not too familiar with Merle Haggard, besides knowing the name and his chosen genre and one song thanks to Song Challenge. But I'm becoming familiar with Willie Nelson through the very back end of his catalog (due to the self-imposed obligations of the RCAA), and I can say that nonagenarian Willie Nelson singing the classic country songs of yesteryear is a logical move, and Willie Nelson singing the classic country songs that his dead friend wrote is an emotionally effective move. The only piece of the puzzle that is missing for me (and not for this album's intended audience) is a familiarity with the songs themselves. Apparently, these are some of Haggard's most well-known tunes. I am not very aware of the classic country songbook, but I like the innocence of these songs, generally. It reminds me of something I'd have heard in Nashville. It goes down easy. Best of all, though, is the idea of someone missing their friend and thinking on their friendship and having fun making art while reminiscing. It's clear that Willie Nelson is doing just that on Workin' Man, and that's what puts it slightly ahead of any other late-stage Nelson album that might drop here in the 21st century.

GRADE: 3.5 pukes out of 5

(Keeping Up)

The Rolling Stones

Steel Wheels — RC Week 24 — 1.5 pukes out of 5

Hackney Diamonds — Song of the Week — 3 pukes out of 5

Foreign Tongues

July 10, 2026

The Rolling Stones are old, and anything they release in 2026 is going to be, by definition, inessential. That's okay. That's the baseline we're starting at, and I'm okay with you. You know why? Because Charlie Watts isn't on this album. I HATE the de-aging deepfakery of "In the Stars," but can you imagine how much worse it would've been if we had to watch a de-aged Charlie Watts sourpuss his way through this bullshit? The Stones are old and inessential, so I say this with a healthy dose of irony and sarcasm, don't worry, but: the Rolling Stones are a better band without Charlie Watts. ANYWAY, the hope with these kinds of things is that they can give us at least two great songs. They do enough here to get there. The aforementioned "In the Stars," if you ignore the video, is one of them. The other is "Divine Intervention." Both choruses absolutely soar for these two songs. And in 2026, on a new Rolling Stones album, two great songs is way more than enough to keep me satisfied. Certainly more than enough to even out nonsense like "Mr. Charm." I think it's fun to think about the Stones in the present, even though, of course, fucking DUH, it's no Sticky Fingers. If you expected that, you're a moron. Give me two good songs.

GRADE: 3 pukes out of 5

(Random RCAA News)

• Soccer suuuuuuucks but the World Cup Championship's halftime show included Post Malone, BTS, and Burna Boy.
• Mick Jagger speaks on separate occasions about his fellow RC alumni Olivia Rodrigo and Geese.
• Kelly Clarkson has the Taco Bell parasite.
• Waxahatchee had her baby!

In My Place 205

July 24, 2026. 40.08448, -75.09376. See the updated map here. See all the blog posts here.

I can feel the long hand of capitalism, how there are powers effecting change in my life, millions of tiny little pushes on the small of my back down this path, toward this store, in an effort to get me to spend my money on this product specifically, the ingredients that are designed to be bad for you but addictive, the advertisements that have infiltrated my subconscious, the sense of pleasure I get when I have a taste, the memories formed for me and my middle kid, her especially, years from now she'll think back and remember those moments that she bonded with her dad, waiting the ten minutes in the lobby of the mass-produced pizza shop, playing word games, excited for the pizza she waited all week for, that nostalgia pulling her back toward this very shop like it does me, even though I know, I know it's not good, it's a net negative, except that I had a long week too, and so why not get pizza, why not get it from here, why not.

Discussion — Week 390: Being So Normal by Peach Pit

I started this last week and I'm going to continue it this week, and see how it feels as we progress from here on out—the end-of-week discussion thread featuring an image of the rear artwork on the CD packaging for the album. Otherwise, we'd be forced to stare at a picture of an actual pit of a peach.

Now that we are wrapping up Peach Pit week, what did you think? Did any of the reviews change your mind? Join us in the comments. I'll be down there. Happy Friday, everybody, we fucking made it.

Being So Normal, Sunny

I had a friend from pandemic time who confused Passion Pit and Peach Pit. There’s no more to that anecdote; I just come to realize he's confused them on name alone.

What a fun piece of surf rock. The combination of groovy basslines, easy melodies and hooks, solid indie rock voice, and semi-sense lyrics lands right in my wheelhouse.

I dialed into this album on Monday and have been with it since. I like side A a bit more with "Guillotine," "Normal," and "Aphrodite." Side B things get a little too moody and surf rock voice a little serious. But also in the back half they do some freeform nonsense which has its own good feel. It's summer, season for stone fruit and pits. Rip that shit again.

Being So Normal, Allison

Look, it's not Peach Pit's fault that for the last five weeks I've only wanted to listen to Death Cab for Cutie's new album, I Built You a Tower. But it is their fault that they've chosen to sound like Vampire Weekend meets Phish. Peach Pit's debut album, Being So Normal, has a few near-earworms in kind of catchy tracks like "Chagu's Sideturn" (obligatory "who?") and "Alrighty Aphrodite," but the album just barely held my interest. I don't think I need an indie pop jam band, thanks though. I'll keep listening to Death Cab for Cutie's new album, I Built You a Tower. 

2/5

Being So Normal, Nate

There are many recurring daydreams. Maybe you've had this one: with the wave of a hand and in a liminal space without end (think the milky white loading world that Morpheus and Neo occupy at points in The Matrix), every single people on the early is suddenly present and placed in a "best to worst" order. The scale can change: maybe it's looks, maybe it's how funny they are, maybe it's an ethical judgement on "good to bad." The daydream allows for a true objectivity, and for one to placed in a line, know their order in a group. 

My uncle once said to his progressive daughter, during an argument that was either about the ethics of land ownership or the politics of recognizing gender fluidity, that in order for him to make his way in the world, he needed to put people into groups. All people need to fall within ten to fifteen groups. He said he was not picky about how those groups were constructed ("You can make the groups! You tell me the groups!"), but that he needed the ability to bundle people together to make the world coherent for himself.

The fear enters my house only at night, and only in the handful of minutes before I go to bed alone. Waking to a noise at 2:30 AM does not bring the fear. One of the children calling out in the blackness does not bring the fear. The fear comes in dusk light, in the fading orange glow of a bedside lamp casting deep, soft shadows on a mostly dim room. Sleep will come, but in the moments before I sometimes imagine that there is, on the sidewalk, an entity shrouded in black, slowly making its way into the house, going from room to room and looming its negative face over the sleeping eyes and mouths of the other bodies in the house. It checks for sleep. It looks for a long time, and if you were to open your eyes you would really see it, but sleep is the protection. It can tell when you are faking, so the job becomes pretending to fall asleep so hard that it actually happens. 

4/10

Being So Normal, Gloria

I've been having a hard time knowing what to write for this, as I think it's a near-perfect album and one of my favorites. But I don't want to write about how an album is good. But I guess it's better than writing about an album that I think is bad?

I'm sitting in a coffee shop and decided to put it on my headphones and write for the length of the album, whatever comes to mind that is not related to music directly.

The first thing I think about is how there is one person who knows how to drop the guillotine on me. One of the only people who I've loved who could deeply destroy me with a few words. And I wonder how much of that is because they've been diagnosed with narcissistic tendencies and how much of that is just because they are an Aquarius.  

I read once that your soul works through the different Zodiac signs during its reincarnations. As in Aries are newer souls, so things feel harder for them. They still have so much to learn, and it's so hard to be a person stumbling through Earth for the first time. And as a Pisces, I'm almost done, ready for my soul to no longer be mine, but rather for it to dissolve and go back into the great cosmic soup. So, it makes sense, as an Aquarius has seen just about the same number of reincarnations as a Pisces would have, so that they would understand a heart's weak spots differently.

But I don't really know if I believe any of that. I also don't know if I'm ready for my soul to be done with its earth reincarnations. I think about that a lot and I think that there are still lives that I'd like to live. But maybe I'll feel differently when I'm older and live more in this lifetime. 

I mostly want to believe in astrology when it tells me exactly what I want to hear. And it's right often enough that I can't help but have some belief in it. I'm always so mesmerized when I put my birth information into compatibility calculators with someone else's data; it's accurate, but you need the exact date, birth location, and time. I was born at 7:30 AM on the day the Gulf War ended, in case you want to see what an internet astrology app would say about our compatibility. 

Because of the significance of that date and time, my mom almost named me Irene instead of Gloria, since it means peace. Irene is the daughter of Zeus and Themis. She is the goddess of peace and the personification of harmony and wealth. That's a good name. I would have liked having that name too.

Aphrodite is the motherless daughter of Uranus, born from sea foam after he was castrated by Cronus and his genitals were thrown into the sea. She emerged from the sea fully grown (think Botticelli's The Birth of Venus), and is the goddess of love, beauty, procreation, and desire. The Pisces origin story comes from her too. In Greek mythology, Aphrodite and her son Eros jumped into the Euphrates River and transformed into fish to escape the murderous giant Typhon.

But I feel like this is too much about astrology and not at all about Peach Pit lyrics. Not at all about being normal.

I wondered if Chagu is also a god that I never heard of, and did a quick search on Google. He's not. He's a musician and was the band's tour guide in Indonesia. Chagu kept saying, "we got to side turn sometime." But that ended up being slang for doing crystal meth. You definitely don't need to side turn sometimes.

And that's 37 minutes. It's less thoughts than I thought I'd have, but that's fine. I was constantly distracted by how good this album is.

Being So Normal, Joe

Good stuff! I liked this one.

"It's never a straight line with the bozo" I can hear you say, under your breath, as you read the opening lines to this album review for Being So Normal by Peach Pit. "What's the catch?" There's no catch. There's no punchline. I'm stating my opinion, from a place of honesty and a wish for purity. I liked the album. I thought it was catchy. Four young lads putting together some nice tunes, that fit firmly and comfortably in the zeitgeist of the time into which it was released. The mid-'10s. It rises to the middle-top of the heap of the thousands of bands like them, and the spotlight placed upon this work of art this week in the ritual of Record Club made it rise a little more, made my appreciation for it grow. This is a good thing. It's a good album.

Still waiting for the But? It's not coming. Don't get your hopes up, okay?

I have often espoused the theory that the album review should offer a view of the author, as opposed to the music itself. You can gather your own opinion about the music from just listening to the damn music, but you can only gather an opinion of the author through the specific words that they write. So, often, my own personal album reviews have acted as a big blinking arrow light inward, toward my own innards, the guts within me that make me who I am. When I don't like an album, that means that the blinking arrow sign is pointing toward the rotten part of my slimy heart that dislikes albums like that, and the review offers a view of that rot and slime. That's what I choose to expose. To be offended by this view means you're doing it wrong. It means you're misunderstanding what I'm trying to do here. It means, in short, that I am a shitty writer, but there's not much we can do about that now, this late in the game.

It should work the other way too. When I like an album. Like I do now.

I was thinking about the video for "Drop the Guillotine," which I watched a few times (because my iPod is acting up again, and so I did the thing where I'm listening to my new (to me) music in embedded YouTube playlists sans commercials), and liked it better each time I saw it. In it, the frontman breaks away from the rest of the band and goes on his own little adventure. He makes his way through the theater department of his school and is placed in costume and forced into a mock tribunal in which he's yelled at by a bunch of other students in powdered wigs, and eventually banished to the pillory, a fate that he's mighty upset about. And I was thinking about how maybe that whole thing mirrors some part of the process here, how we get so passionate about this shit but ultimately it's all just playacting, we're all just wearing costumes, yelling because it's part of the theater of it all. And how maybe I don't need to put on the powdered wig every week, ya know? How maybe it would be nice to sometimes just say that an album is good, is nice, is pleasant.

Like, I don't have to turn over every stone. I could find flaws and talk about them here if I wanted to. But then, you see, the flaws become my own, and that creates drama and misunderstanding within the cracks of the artistic machinery, this being flawed design anyway, and I come off missing the target, which should be "what do I think about this album" and end up with some paltry version of "how am I feeling about myself this week," which is pretty stupid, overall. But I'm stupid, and this is how I've operated for 390 weeks in a row now, and it's just something we all gotta put up with for the remainder of my life.

I'm not talking about the album, by the way. Nothing negative to say. I'm not even worried. But if I did have something bad to say about it, then that would be reflected onto me. I don't, so it doesn't. I like this album and so I am feeling good about life. Or maybe I am feeling good about life and so I like the album. Either one, it doesn't matter. It's just nice, sometimes, to listen to an album, and be like, "oh damn, that song 'Chagu's Sideturn' is so catchy, I like that." Without the drama that becomes necessary when I don't like something. The drama that I create, in the act of turning the criticisms inward. There's nothing curdling this week, no negativity to stuff deep. It's not that type of album. It's just good.

I don't have much of a job when it comes to these types of albums. It's not revelatory, and so I don't need to explain why it is. It's just a normal good album. And, as I've already said too many times now, it's not bad, so I don't have to explain why I'm a piece of shit for not liking it. It's just a nice, pleasant album. We've covered plenty of artists of this quality in this dinky little music club before—your MJ Lendermans, your Jalen Ngondas, your EarthGangs, your Haitus Kaiyotes, your Districtses, your Footballheads, all of them good in the classic sense, all of them nice to listen to, all of them pleasant, none of them really inspiring anything interesting to say, just normal pleasant goodness. And typically, I think I default to something negative in this context too. I.e. if there's nothing interesting to say beyond "it's good," then that must mean "it's boring," which is in itself bad.

But I'm not gonna do that here, with our pals Peach Pit. I do not think there is anything interesting in the music itself, but I do think it's interesting to strip that expectation away every once in a while, and just view the quality of the music for what it is, not what it means. If I'm listening to this indie rock album and I like it and it's pleasant and I don't have any strong opinions about it in either direction from that starting point, then instead of asking myself why those opinions aren't strong, I'm just taking it for what it is. That this is just a good album, and I like it, and it doesn't have to be any deeper than that. Accuse me of using this as a defense mechanism, I don't give a fuck. I don't need to put up with strong opinions this week. That is my choice. I'm choosing to say that I like Being So Normal by Peach Pit, and that, for this week and maybe possibly only this week, is enough.

GRADE: 3 pukes out of 5

The Highwomen, Sunny

I picked the album for today because we did the Brandi Carlile album. I didn't read the post, but I scanned through it and saw a Blind Spots post on the Highwaymen. I'll come back to that. I ended up liking this album more than the Brandi album. That might be because I had more time or openness to it this week. But it's also this interesting experience of coming into a supergroup album not really knowing any of the artist, not really being into the genre, not really being into the themes.

I listened to the album maybe three and a half times total, but after the first time, I remembered that Blind Spots post, and I went back and read it, and listened to the first song. I was like... oh, I see. It's an homage/parody that the Highwomen are doing. I didn't know about that either. Clearly my adult autism brain paused for a moment, and was like, "If it's the Highwaymen, then it should be the Highwaywomen." Highwomen is something else. Highwomen sounds much better than Highwaywomen, so that probably matters more. But that did get stuck in my craw for a bit.

So rethinking about the album in that sense, through the second and third time, I came to liking it. The first two songs really do answer the question of "what is a Highwomen?" Ya know, "Highwoman, she was in Iran-Contra, and she escaped." "Highwoman, she was in the Salem Witch Trials and hung." "Highwoman, she was a freedom rider in the South." It was nice seeing Yola in there! What a delight. I was like... okay. I don't really remember what Johnny Cash and Willie were talking about in the other song, but maybe that's the analogous.

And then Track 2 redoubles into it. I think it's literally called "Redesigning Women." It's like, "Here's what the Highwoman is again." I thought that was good. It's a thesis-based project. Which, again, the project, I don't really care about, but from that detached perspective, I can still kind of enjoy. Then immediate go into Track 3, which is just a typical country radio song. "I'm not your loose change, I'm your lucky penny!" It still falls into the theme of "womanhood," but we're just bouncing around, having country fun.

Track 4, that one even sounds like a parody of country songs! For the next four or five tracks, that's mostly what I noted down—"this feels like a different kind of country song." Like, Amanda has a touch of the Reba, a little bit of the Reba flair. There's a couple big tracks, "Wild Child," "Old Soul." Big anthems. It ends on a big anthem too. Those were fun, although they were a bit long. But then you had more country standards. "Don't Call Me," which is a swinging, honky-tonkin', jug-tootin'-type song. A couple times I wrote down: "This is another jug-hooter." Which is... it's a country album, so you expect some jug-hooters, but in the relief of this opening of "We're the Highwomen, and that means something!" What does it mean? Now we're jug-hooters too, I guess.

I'm still enjoying it. I love the "1-800-GO-TO-HELL," I'm gonna use that. Then there's a sad song on death or whatever toward the end. I didn't care for it, but I understand it has to be in there. I really liked the one song that was like "Don't call me mama, I like wine and I'm hungover, and I can't deal with you right now." So if I went ahead and said, "What is a Highwoman?" I guess from the Highwaymen, from what I remember, it was all these men doing crazy stuff. One dude is building a dam and drowns, another guy gets crushed by a steamroller in Looney Toons or something. Whereas the Highwomen were like "I'm going to be my own lady, and go out and do stuff." Which is great! Maybe it's culturally on point.

So overall, good album. Not my genre, but good album. I appreciate the supergroup nature of it. Brandi and Amanda Shires in particular were very good.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Joe: I feel like for some of these albums, I go back and I wish Sunny had been part of it. Because I feel like that's the important question: what are they trying to do here? The people who did it that week dismissed it—myself included—and maybe my thought at the time was an album about power to women. Do they do this enough? Like you said, there are songs that are just fucking country songs, that don't speak to the power of women. So maybe viewing it that way is a sign of failure on their part. Whereas I was thinking today—and what I think you would've gotten to first, if you were there in November 2019—is that this is country album in the way that the Highwaymen did a country album, in that they are taking the tropes of country, and applying them to a certain gender. So the Highwaymen were explicitly masculine in the way they were doing it, because that's what country was at the time, whereas the Highwomen are presenting those same tropes, but from a different perspective. This isn't an album about women, but it's reimagining the country tropes as centered by women.

Sunny: There's that one track toward the end, I forget what the name of it was. "I love this woman, and she doesn't know I love her." And the first time I listened to it, I was like, are they just doing a cover of a male-perspective song, or is this a lesbian femme-love thing? And by the end of the song it's very clear it's the latter. And I think that reaffirms what you're saying, that it takes the tropes—this is a classic type of country song—and then bringing it to them, and playing on perfume vs. cologne, and all these other little things.

Joe: I don't know why I assumed that Brandi Carlile was the mastermind behind that song, as the lesbian of the group.

Sunny: That would be my assumption without looking into it.

Joe: I looked it up. Amanda Shires and her then husband Jason Isbell wrote that song, and Shires is the lead on that.

Sunny: Interesting.

Joe: This is something I looked up on Wikipedia on the car ride here—

Sunny: As all good research is done.

Joe: —and I think that that speaks toward the togetherness of the Highwomen. That they are expressing empathy toward the whole of the woman experience. Just because Amanda Shires is straight doesn't mean that she can't empathize with her bandmate Brandi Carlile. And in a winking way too.

Sunny: You're right, the song is a little tongue-in-cheek, which definitely plays into that. So all these Highwomen are speaking to this universal woman experience, flush with the country thing. If someone is to be over critical, you could call it tokenizing. The one criticism is, ya know, country is racist, the South is racist, and all these women are white. So on Track 1, they immediately try to combat that. 

Joe: "We need Yola!"

Sunny: "We gotta get Yola in there." Maren isn't in there! She doesn't have a verse about the first woman to discover radioactivity or something like that. It's just Brandi, Amanda, and Yola on there.

Joe: She's not singing about hitting number one on a Chainsmokers song.

Sunny: Exactly.

Joe: I guess it's interesting to think about Maren Morris has purposefully removed herself from the genre of country. Not that she is doing Chainsmokers songs again or anything. But she's definitely been very expressive about how country is dominated by Morgan Wallen types, and I don't want anything to do with that shit anymore. Which makes me sad, in a way, that maybe the mission of the Highwomen has failed. If the purpose of this was to present it from a different perspective, then you have bad faith actors like Morgan Wallen who are purposefully leaning in the other direction. A more traditional direction... not saying that Willie Nelson or Johnny Cash were racist at all, they seemed to be pretty liberal. I guess just the idea that masculinity, like if you value that, then that seems to be more of a conservative thing. So masculinity looks different in country music.

Sunny: And there's a performative nature to everything we're talking about, but these are all performers. So I think to your point, one could say that the Highwoman project, if that was the point, was a bit of a failure. Or they weren't able to fight against all the culture that... I mean, they are one band, with one album, versus the whole country that's gone in a certain direction.

Joe: That genre specifically, I guess. I know that the Brandi Carlile album we listened to came out well before The Highwomen, but that didn't seem very country to me.

Sunny: Yeah, a lot of pop sensibilities, a lot of rock sensibilities.

Joe: Amanda Shires isn't really... she's more Americana, which is rooted in country but removed from the traditional outlaw country. Less familiar with Natalie Hemby. She was more of a country writer. She has since released an album of her own, since this. So I don't know, I can't really speak to her experience. I feel like maybe, instead of seeing this as four country artists that are coming together to reclaim the genre that they work in, it's more like four musicians who work slightly outside the genre, who admire people like the men in the Highwaymen, and are trying to reclaim it for them.

Sunny: And trying to take back a bit of this genre. To your point, they are not all in it all the time. Which is probably why they can produce a project like this. They have a little bit of outside perspective. Did they make any more music after this?

Joe: Together? No. I mean, they probably have worked together, in certain combinations. So, okay, I looked up Yola's most recent album, the 2021 album. What was that called? [Editor's note: Stand for Myself.] Rachel S. picked the Yola album before that for Record Club, Walk Through Fire. And then there was one that came out around the time we covered Walk Through Fire. Fuck, what was that called? I looked it up because, since then, Yola has also not really done any country stuff. Those two albums were produced by the Black Keys dude, Dan Auerbach. And she has since said, yeah that dude's a piece of shit, I'm never gonna work with him again. And I wanted to look up her two best songs, "Diamond Studded Shoes" and "Stand for Myself," and they are co-written by Auerbach. So I don't know. Where was I going with this?

Sunny: Artists outside of country... oh, do these people work together again?

Joe: Oh yeah. On that album, Natalie Hemby co-wrote a song as well.

Sunny: So they're still in contact.

Joe: Yeah, they're all pals.

Sunny: But the Highwomen project is not an ongoing thing.

Joe: Right, it is not. They did all they could. And I don't blame them for not wanting to put up with that shit. Like, if they're not within that genre firmly, and they released an album right now that was explicitly pro-feminist, people like us would be like, oh that's cool, let's listen. But that genre...

Sunny: Marketing it in the circles that it would be marketed in would be very difficult.

Joe: Fox News would have a field day. They'd have Morgan Wallen on the talk show to do his thing. They'd have Jelly Roll on there!

Sunny: It would be an easy target, sure.

Joe: Yeah man, I think I agree that it's not the best album ever. But that's more genre, not purpose behind it.

Sunny: And not talent. Clearly these people are making good music, and displaying it.

Joe: Is that something that comes in time? I know we were talking about how long you've been doing this, how long we've been doing this. I got the sense that, back then, listening to The Highwomen, I did not have the capacity to understand that you can appreciate art, or knowing the purpose behind the art, without liking the art itself. I don't know if that's my way of coping with having to do a review every week for the rest of my life, and the boredom that would come from saying "this is a shitty album, fuck this, I'm never listening to it again," like not considering the depth of it. Or, if it's actually true. Do you get that sense? In book club, film club, whatever, that you're at the point where you can appreciate art even if you don't like it?

Sunny: Yeah. Listen, I don't know anything. [laughter] But I would say two things. One, the repeated process—and Record Club for me was probably the biggest jump, and you've posted about this too—I've certainly previously been an "anything but rap and country" person, and now I kind of like rap and country, in the right context. So that in itself is a marker of change. I think doing art appreciation, art criticism, and just enjoying art, is a muscle like anything else. In the same way you'd go to visual art school and seeing a bunch of paintings you might not like, being exposed to them still helps you develop taste, helps you understand them, helps you understand the history around it, and all of that helps you appreciate all the stuff you do like even more. And so, yeah, I'm big on saying that doing this for however many years has helped sharpen that tool. And it's also revealed the Dunning-Kruger Effect of it all: the more I know, the more I realize I don't know anything. There's even more depth to music and art than I could ever wrap my head around. I try to be humble about that too. But yeah, that's a big reason I keep doing Record Club. It exercises muscles of art appreciation, being able to extemporaneously write, and also being able to take 40 minutes and listen to music intently. Which is a harder thing than you'd give credit for!

Joe: Apparently! Based on the fact that very few people do this. Especially week in and week out.

Sunny: I mean, I know very few people who sit down, put on a record, even one side of a record or album, and just listen to it. Maybe doodle around with it, or write with it, but just listen to it. Not do their chores or their laundry while they're listening, not thinking about work while they're doing it, not being on the computer while they're doing it, or on their phone. Just listen to the music. That speaks to more our greater culture, but I think this project does ask for it. I don't do it every week, and there are definitely some weeks I just listen to it on the way to work. But the weeks that I do, it's nice.

Joe: Do you feel like you like the album more when you have those moments for concentration on the music? Is that just a given?

Sunny: I think it's hard not to. In the same, if it's a piece of music, one that I don't like in the same way, it's not as sweet or enjoyable, I might like it or appreciate it more, having given it that time and attention, and find at least something... even on the worst album, there's usually at least one track or one chorus or verse where I'm like "that's kinda catchy and fun, they're doing something."

Joe: I wonder if you—and I know we've talked about a similar theory with the Reba thing, but more specifically to liking something, as opposed to the more philosophical stuff—does that argument become "I don't like this because I did not devote enough time to it"? Could any album improve, could any album get to the point where you like it for what it is, not what it tries to do, if given enough time and space? And should the assumption be that if somebody who doesn't do Record Club every week, and decides to pop in, and says "You know what, this Highwomen album kinda sucks!" Can we assume that that is because they didn't listen to it forty times over six years?

Sunny: I can almost definitely assume that they haven't. [laughter] I think so, though. I think there's something to that. So the question is, what does it mean of the quality of music that it's able to hook somebody, maybe a lot of people, in that first time? I guess that's Taylor Swift. She's able to, for millions of people on the first listen, people will be like, I like this. Whereas there's a lot of other music, like Buckethead for example. There's a lot of depth in there, but a lot of people here would be like "I'm not going to bother with any more of this, and don't bring it up to me again."

Joe: [laughter] Amazing example. Nah, it just feels like there's a responsibility, if like... I don't want Record Club to be a conduit to irresponsibility, that this would just be a place to talk shit on something you don't know about. Which is fine, ya know, it happens. And sometimes there are albums that I listen to 20 times and I still fucking hate them.

Sunny: Sometimes I totally understand where they're coming from, and I hate that they came from that place.

Joe: It's just the limiting nature of Record Club, it just feels like too much of a constraint sometimes. You have five days to do it. And then something like the Highwomen comes along that... I didn't like. At the time. I literally said in my review, this is a bad album. But I... I don't do this anymore, but at the time, Martha was being born, and I wrote it in advance, because I knew I wasn't going to be dealing with this stuff in the hospital. I have since had another child, and dealt with it in the hospital, because that's what I do now. But I certainly did not give this the time that it deserved. And now, I've been listening to it again, a couple times this morning, all these years later, and it just feels something was missing. Which isn't fair to these artists, and it isn't fair to my experience, our experience...

Sunny: Yeah, but like you said, one of your daughters was being born that week, you know what I mean? Everything you said is true, and also it's in contrast with having some value in a project that is time-constrained and runs every week. And that creates a different experience. I guess you can't have both. Or you can't have both at the same time. You do summer projects that run a bit longer to have that space. For Record Club, which one is better? Or which one would you get more engagement? Or more interesting writing from? That I'm not sure.

Joe: I don't know why I'm hung up on it for this particular one. Maybe because we covered a couple of the Highwomen's, and a couple of the Highwaymen's, albums since then, and I treated them with more respect, as a piece of art. And I don't like the idea of someone going back and reading my November 2019 review of The Highwomen, and being like, oh no, you didn't do this right.

Sunny: Sure, but that's why they can look at your November 2024 reappraisal. [laughter]

Joe: There you go. I took that as a syllable thing, by the way. Highwomen vs. Highwaymen.

Sunny: These are musicians first, not literary majors.

Joe: Is "highway woman," could that be misconstrued as a prostitute or something?

Sunny: It could be, I guess. But maybe that would be an appropriate person to sing a song about. And redeem.

Joe: What are you giving this album?

Sunny: I'd probably give it a 3 out of 5. I like two or three tracks a lot, I appreciate what they're doing, but there are at least four or five tracks that I thought were just stupid. Or, if it is a parody, then I get it! I don't have to keep watching it!