Nora Guthrie, Woody’s daughter, brought Billy Bragg and Wilco together in the mid-1990s in hopes that they would be inspired to write music for a cache of songs that only had surviving lyrics.1 The resultant project, Mermaid Avenue, emerged as a well-received record in 1998, with a sequel (featuring “Remember the Mountain Bed”) in 2000. A third, catch-all volume brought all of the recordings together in a single set in 2012.

The title of the project relates to the street Guthrie lived on in Coney Island in the 1940s. The evocatively named street, Mermaid Avenue, dates to the late 19th century, when developers used spirited names to entice homeowners to settle in Coney Island. Woody Guthrie moved his family to an apartment on Mermaid in 1943, the year before he penned “Mountain Bed,” and would live there until 1950. This apartment witnessed its share of happiness and despair, with the address encompassing both births and deaths. The apartments were demolished in the early 1970s. Back in the 2000s, I set out with some friends to see the block during a history conference held in New York. It was a brutally cold January day when we set out for Coney Island, and the MTA train got emptier and emptier. In my memory, the three of us were alone as we trudged down Mermaid to see the long-disappeared building. A few blocks from whatever we were supposed to look at, though, we found ourselves cold, alone, and making a rather suspicious spectacle of ourselves. We telepathically decided to cut our losses and head back. Mermaid Avenue drifted away as an icy apparition.

A few years later, I wrote a paper that used the Mermaid sessions as a way to talk about the larger legacy of Guthrie by connecting it to the 1968 tribute to Woody that took place in Carnegie Hall a few months after his death from Huntington’s disease in October 1967. That tribute concert was important for a number of reasons, including the first public performance of Bob Dylan since his motorcycle crash in 1966. His performance, with a group soon to be rechristened as the Band, included three songs: “I Ain’t Got No Home in This World Anymore,” “Dear Mrs. Roosevelt,” and “Grand Coulee Dam.”

The conference gave me the opportunity to speak with Nora Guthrie as well as one beautiful late-night phone call with Garth Hudson, who played keyboards for Dylan at the concert. I had reached out to Hudson a few weeks earlier and then received word from his wife (Sister Maude) that he wanted to talk, but it would have to be at 3 am, since he was a night owl. We talked (or at least he talked) for a couple of hours well into the receding darkness. At one point, I finally asked him why Dylan chose the three songs that he did for that tribute. Hudson paused and said quietly: “I guess some songs have more colors than others.”

I remember sleeplessly sitting in a hotel room in Pennsylvania trying hard to write down what Hudson was saying and thinking how beautiful it was that his voice softened just a bit when he talked about “Bob,” and how his (non) answer about song selection was the most intense real answer to any question about music ever.

Some songs do have more colors in them.

Thirty years after the Guthrie memorial show, Wilco and Billy Bragg released Mermaid Avenue, the fruits of their collaboration with Woody’s unpublished lyrics. Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy argued that he was more interested in the poetics and artful ambiguities of Guthrie’s writings. “I'm not into Woody the icon,” Tweedy noted, “I'm into Woody the freak weirdo.” At the time, this evaluation made more sense to me—both in terms of what I then knew about Guthrie and my connection to Wilco. But I kept thinking about this line as I stood at Solid Sound, in Western Massachusetts, watching them reconvene these songs for the first time.

Solid Sound is Wilco’s biennial music festival, which brings together a nicely curated collection of acts with Wilco performing a unique set on Friday night, a full-on Wilco set on Saturday, and a Jeff Tweedy-centered set on Sunday afternoon.2 I had the good fortune of attending the first three festivals (in 2010, 2011, and 2013) and then sporadic one-offs since then. Those first two, in particular, were so great, though, even for an adamantly anti-music festival guy like I am—they were contained and curated and cool. The idea of getting to revisit Solid Sound, with the bonus of the lure of Wilco and Bragg revisiting Mermaid Avenue—and with a host of friends in attendance, including the Teaching Woody Guthrie Collective—made it a must-visit.

Jeff Tweedy’s harmonica brought back the heady days of early-2000s Wilco, while it was quietly affecting to see the performance built around Jeff, Billy Bragg, and John Stirratt—the remaining members of the group that made Mermaid Avenue. Since Jeff and Billy rarely played on one another’s songs in the original sessions, seeing them remain together onstage throughout the evening underscored how much these songs have become a shared inheritance. Stirratt, whom I briefly had the chance to speak with, was equally wonderful to see. His background vocals are as integral to these songs as anything else.

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The emotional center of the evening, though, came in its final stretch. “Another Man’s Done Gone” became a moving elegy for Jay Bennett, whose enthusiasm and musical imagination were central to the original project. Billy Bragg’s reading of “The Unwelcome Guest” followed, before the surviving members of the Guthrie family—including Nora and her daughter Anna Canoni—joined everyone onstage for “This Land Is Your Land.” It felt less like the conclusion of a concert than the continuation of a conversation that had begun decades earlier.

Woody’s manuscripts (most housed at the Woody Guthrie Center in Tulsa, OK) are archives of edits, amendments, epigrams and postscripts marking the time and place these songs were written. Often, too, Woody added a splash of paint, a brush of watercolor, or a quick sketch, allowing the songs to continue living in other artistic media. Most of the lyrics later chosen for the Mermaid Avenue project, of course, were never recorded. Some perhaps never progressed beyond the page, while others—including “California Stars”—appear to have been performed on the radio but were never preserved. It is fascinating to imagine Woody’s lost version of “California Stars,” itself named for a quilting pattern, tracing its own trajectory alongside the song we know today—a kind of double helix, a cosmic quilt stitched across time.

Solid Sound reminds us of the continued power of Guthrie’s words and vision. As we remain firmly entranced by the summer of The Odyssey, the Mermaids/Sirens call to us once more.3 Together, they offer a reframing of Woody’s lyrics, Jeff and Billy and Jay’s melodies as we consider how memory continues to warp and recontextualize these songs. Hearing these songs in 2026, twenty-eight years after they were recorded, digs into the recesses of the brain, since of course it also drags you back to where you were in 1998. But standing there, I kept thinking about the content of the songs and how much easier it was in the 1990s to historicize Woody’s use of fascism and how his realities of the 1930s and 1940s seemed mostly symbolic sixty years later. And how in 2026, Woody’s words and intentions seemed much closer to us than they did in 1998; the Jeremy Bearimy of music’s connection to the past/present.

Woody, when he wrote “Remember the Mountain Bed,” spent much of 1944 on and off ships for the Merchant Marines. At some point, he writes this gorgeous set of lyrics as he thinks back to his past, a past, our past. So Woody types his manuscript and adds a note under the title, his name, and the date. A note of origin, perhaps, or reflective of his mood as he wrote those words, or just a subtle nod to the meaning of the entire endeavor: a story shaped by a memory of a mountainside love affair leads to a different kind of subtitle added by the author.

Serving on the SS William Floyd, Guthrie’s mind returns to a moment of purity. He writes a song of love and contentment, of promise and dreams wrapped around the possibility that it is all lost (“do you still sing of the mountain bed”) or never was, or in another read, always is. Sing to me, oh Muse, of the mountain bed, and these memories that seem both tangible and just out of reach. The siren song of beauty and pain entwined. A song that stops me in my tracks every time I hear it. As it did in 2006 at the Ryman in Nashville, where the band opened with “Sunken Treasure” (with harmonica) then slid into “Remember the Mountain Bed” and a whole clutch of Woody songs. To that Friday night a handful of weeks ago. The song has a magic in it. Far from home, Woody writes a song that celebrates the primal means of life and of love and of living. And how it feels to hold on to those moments and memories in spite of all the things that conspire to distance you from that life.

Typing those lyrics, Woody added simply: “At Sea Going Home.”

Bert Fischer: “You’re married to the sea.”

Max Fischer: “Yes, that’s true…But I’ve been out to sea for a long time.”4

I provide this sketch of his life as a way of introducing a new project the Teaching Woody Guthrie Collective is embarking on. We were recently awarded the Phil Ochs Fellowship to underwrite research in the Phil Ochs papers housed in Tulsa as part of the American Song Archives. There, the group traced Ochs’ life, career, and legacy through a dense collection of personal and business documents. The Collective is now developing a series of public-facing projects based on this material that we hope to share in the coming months. Much more on this work soon.

But today I wanted to take a brief moment to mark the anniversary of the 1976 memorial concert, which offers a revealing way to think about both Ochs’ historical moment and his legacy from the distance of a half-century. The timing of Ochs’ death and the subsequent tribute allow for a deep look at the relevance of folk music and folk protest at a time of immense change. With the Vietnam War over, questions about the relevance and future of folk protest shadowed the Ochs memorial as stalwarts like Dave Van Ronk, Pete Seeger, Tom Rush, Peter Yarrow, and others came together as if it were 1961. Media commentators at the time openly asked whether these songs could even connect to younger concertgoers. With the war over and the nation looking toward a Bicentennial Summer of selective red, white, and blue memories, Ochs’ legacy seemed ambiguous. Looking back, even the memorial concert is difficult to fully reconstruct, since only fragments of it remain. A concert video was broadcast on WBCN Boston, but the setlist was dramatically reconfigured, with performances deleted and rearranged. The archives have a more complete audio record of the evening, but even then, certain performances seem lost to history. I am working on a longer essay on these issues, but ultimately, as hard as it might be to grasp the totality of Ochs in 2026, it was equally hard to grapple with his complexity in all its humanness in 1976. And yet, his music still resonates. Filled with humor and anger and empathy and despair—it’s all still there. It doesn’t take much to find in his songs a righteousness that fits directly, with all attendant irony and ragefulness, into our current mood.

Show me the country where the bombs had to fall
Show me the ruins of the buildings once so tall
And I'll show you a young land with so many reasons why
And there but for fortune may go you or I, or I

—Phil Ochs, “There But for Fortune” (1963)

Three Tennessee monuments: Memphis, 1905; Nashville, 1978; Nashville, 1998

The memorial landscape honoring Nathan Bedford Forrest—slave trader, Confederate general, and early leader of the Ku Klux Klan—stretches across Tennessee. The story of three particular monuments, constructed across the twentieth century and dismantled in the twenty-first, reveals much about the state’s relationship to the Civil War and its afterlives.1

When white Memphis leaders baked their version of Forrest into the soil in 1905, they created a civic symbol of racial power and the rigid binaries of Jim Crow. The bust installed in Nashville’s Capitol in 1978 reflected a different moment, placing Forrest’s likeness within a state building already fraught with post-Civil Rights tensions. Finally, the polyurethane Forrest erected along Interstate 65 in the 1990s stood as the apotheosis of Lost Cause spectacle: a gauche symbol of ideological excess lumbering in exhaust south of Nashville.

Each monument reflected not the Civil War itself, but the racial and political anxieties of the era that produced it. The Memphis statue tells us far more about white anxieties at the turn of the twentieth century than it does about Forrest himself. The Capitol bust emerged from the politics of backlash and resistance following the Civil Rights Movement. And the fiberglass Forrest of the 1990s functioned less as historical commemoration than as a privatized, plastic spectacle of grievance and nostalgia.

One of the most persistent myths surrounding Confederate monuments is the claim that “no one protested when they went up,” as though southern cities simply erected them through some broad racial consensus. In reality, protests surrounded the Nashville bust in the 1970s, when groups including the NAACP and Black Tennesseans for Action challenged the state’s decision to commemorate Forrest inside the Capitol itself. Earlier resistance to Confederate memorialization often survived only in fragmentary or unrecorded forms. The bust remained there until July 2021, removed just days after Forrest’s 200th birthday.

Confederate monuments often present themselves as artifacts of history when they are actually physical remnants of political struggle.

And yet 1905 is not that long ago. The 1978 Capitol bust belongs to the lived experience of many Tennesseans today, and the roadside Forrest of the 1990s emerged well within the age of cable news and culture-war politics. The fact that all three monuments are now either removed, stored away, or broken apart serves as a reminder of the instability of supposedly permanent things. Forrest still reverberates across Tennessee history, as he has since the 1870s, but the landscape itself has shifted.

Civil War Memory in the Classroom

For years, I taught these stories as part of a broader narrative about expanding rights and historical reckoning. Over the last twenty-five years, I have taught the second half of U.S. History—1877 to the present—more times than I can count. For a long time, those classes ended on a cautiously hopeful note: that, however unevenly, American history revealed a broader narrative of the expansion of rights and democratic inclusion.

More recently, however, I have found myself delivering lectures I have given for years while simultaneously realizing that what once felt historically settled no longer even holds the status of consensus. Whether discussing the Fourteenth Amendment or the Voting Rights Act of 1965, lectures once delivered as mostly settled history now feel provisional. Sometimes that realization becomes part of the classroom discussion itself. Even when it does not, it lingers beneath the surface as a reminder of how quickly political and historical assumptions can erode.

Back in the early 2000s, I often ended the semester with a discussion of the Thirteenth Amendment, which formally abolished slavery in 1865. Mississippi did not ratify the amendment at the time. The state finally did so in 1995—during the same legislative session in which lawmakers designated square dancing the “American folk dance of Mississippi.” Yet even then, the ratification did not become official until 2013, after a professor happened to investigate the issue following a viewing of Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln. I think about that story often now—not simply because of what the Thirteenth Amendment still means in the United States, but because it reflects a deeper culture of historical amnesia and perpetual unknowing.

The story of Tennessee’s memorial landscape is not exceptional. In many ways, it is the foundational story of the modern South. The Memphis statue, the Nashville bust, and the ridiculous roadside Forrest of the 1990s all once appeared enduring until, suddenly, they no longer were. Forrest remains embedded in Tennessee history even as the monuments themselves disappear. The monuments were never really about preserving the past. Instead, they were attempts to stabilize a social order that no longer felt secure. What once appeared permanent now survives only in fragments, photographs, empty pedestals, and concrete ruins.

What does feel revealing are the loops. There was a week in the spring when I listened to “Fins” by Jimmy Buffett approximately 372 times. Or the afternoon, in a dive bar on Martha’s Vineyard of all places, when I heard “In My Own Way” by the Marshall Tucker Band and then listened to nothing else for two weeks. My rock-flute era. More recently, it was “Baby You’re a Rich Man” (takes 11 and 12) from Anthology 4. No amount of essaying can really explain these moments. Maybe, as with the Grateful Dead, there’s a hidden throughline. More likely—even after all this time—you just get lost in a song.

Some of this questioning has to do with my listening habits this year, and their quiet dissolving. Connecting to music feels harder right now, and much of that difficulty stems from how I listen. I still play LPs, though I feel infinitely removed from my collector days. For the first time in years, CDs started appearing in the house. This summer, as documented here, I spent an inordinate amount of time listening to cassettes. I still don’t have a great explanation for how this happened, but it made a certain sense at the time.

Whatever promise streaming once held feels like a distant memory. Considering that I wrote my dissertation on early jazz before iTunes existed—tracking down strange box sets and battered 78s as best I could—the present moment is almost incomprehensible. With streaming, as with so many things, it just gets worse and worse. I grew so tired of Spotify, and to a lesser extent Apple Music, that I wanted to delete them all. These platforms feel like they paint you into corners: the same songs, the same playlists, the same gentle nudges toward sameness. I wanted out.

Then my phone glitched.

Earlier this summer, I suddenly couldn’t add music to Apple Music. After many chats and—shudder—phone calls, nothing could be done. I had stumped the Apple Geniuses (I even received the dreaded “I have never seen something like this” line). The solution was their so-called nuclear option: hard deletes, resets, and a rebuild from scratch. I lost a lot of music in the process. It felt awful. It also felt liberating. I loved it, and I hated it, which seems about right. As I’ve tried to rebuild my relationship with listening itself, the whole episode has started to feel like an accidental metaphor.

Outside the Spotify/Apple ecosystem, I did find musical spelunking joy elsewhere. Bandcamp remains a refuge. American Drunkard is ceaselessly entertaining and still has the best year-end list in the game. And a newcomer for me this year: Stephan Kunze’s zensounds, a Substack devoted to ambient music (broadly defined). I’ve found more new sounds through these sites than anywhere else.

Still, beyond the question of how to listen (technologically) is the more elusive question of how to listen (methodologically). Over the past several years, I have imposed various listening experiments on myself—last year’s jazz-a-day, for instance. I did none of that this year, partly because it sometimes felt like a chore. But having no structure at all left me feeling rootless. It turns out I missed the task. I’m looking forward to trying something different in 2026.

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With all of that as prologue, here are the records that made an impact on my year:

1. Geese, Getting Killed / Cameron Winter, Heavy Metal (2024)

   Yes, yes—it’s Geese. Back in the spring, two different friends cajoled me into listening to Cameron Winter’s solo record, released in December 2024. I disliked it. Then I re-listened and disliked it again. But for some reason, it kept drifting back into rotation. And then I understood.

   Something very similar happened with his band, Geese—records that initially repel before becoming the soundtrack of the now. Last summer, during the World of Dylan conference, our friend group quickly developed a shorthand language of inside jokes held together by Geese references. The way music works.

   Then this fall, Geese came to town, but I had a concert-commitment conflict. While browsing a bookstore the day of the show, I looked up—and it was Cameron. I walked over and said, “Are you Cameron?” He nodded. I had not workshopped this bit in advance. We chatted, and in hindsight, I think I may have explained the concept of used bookstores to him. He asked if I worked there. At any rate, in person, he is clearly a rock star in every way, and his records are supernaturally great—especially on the third or fourth time around.

   Send me the basslines of the future.

2. Jeff Tweedy, Twilight Override / Wilco, A Ghost Is Born (Deluxe Edition)

   I generally avoid writing about Wilco/Tweedy—it feels too obvious, given how many years I’ve devoted to this music—a Court cliché. I have seen them live more than any other act, by a wide margin. But this year, I listened more intently than I have in a long time.

   Featuring thirty songs across three records, Twilight Overload is immediate in ways Tweedy’s recent work has often resisted. The high points are numerous and rotating, revealing themselves differently with each listen. Little of the record sounds much like Wilco, underscoring how much that band has evolved, but it still very much sounds like Tweedy—who sings here with a strong, unguarded voice.

   Live, he sounds rejuvenated, touring with most of the musicians from the record, all of whom are much younger than him (including his two sons). The tour felt like a warm victory lap for a project that clearly meant something to everyone onstage.

   This year also brought the release of a massive box set of outtakes and live cuts related to 2004’s A Ghost Is Born—the Royal Tenenbaums to Yankee Hotel Foxtrot’s Rushmore (no, I will not elaborate). The box offers an evolutionary look at the record’s near-chaotic origins while highlighting the experimentalism at its core, including seven thirty-minute “Fundamentals” that frame how the band built these songs. Endlessly listenable.

   I broke my finger / playing middle C.

3. Guided By Voices, Thick Rich and Delicious

   Perhaps the surprise of the year: GBV’s forty-second (!) album.

   I have a friend who, at least during the years we spent the most time together, listened only to Guided By Voices (and Bob Pollard’s solo records and infinite side projects). I believed him. He could quote Pollard in any situation, as if it were oxygen—which, at the time, it probably was. I think about this constraint a lot: all Pollard, all the time. It seems both exhausting and liberating.

   I was deeply into the band in the 1990s and early 2000s, but after the original lineup dissolved, I stopped following them closely. Every new record—three or so per year—contained at least one killer song, a couple of almosts, and a lot I never heard again. But Thick Rich and Delicious is the first truly great record from them in a long time. It sounds like a band playing together, whether or not that’s how it was assembled.

   It has been a very long time since Pollard delivered a four-song run as strong as “(You Can’t Go Back To) Oxford Talawanda,” “Phantasmagoric Upstarts,” “Lucy’s World,” and “Our Man Syracuse.” The second half is just as good. “Xeno Urban” stands out—characteristically obtuse, with a gorgeous acoustic turn in its back half. Pollard’s voice sounds terrific throughout. Who knows what it means, but it somehow contains everything.

   What gives the record its gravity is how deeply the songs are sutured to history. Nostalgia is a thorny subject for GBV: Pollard tends to dismiss sentimentality while maintaining an acute historical awareness of his own catalog. This shows up in projects like the Suitcase series—now at 400 unused tracks across four box sets—but also in lyrics and titles that drift across songs and decades. Breadcrumbs for the initiated.

   Here, though, the weight feels heavier. Melodies, hooks, and callbacks—like “The Lighthouse Resurrection” borrowing openly from “Ester’s Day,” which first appeared on Bee Thousand (1994), itself a fragment spliced from an earlier song—circle back with purpose. Pollard’s cosmology swirling into something like a Gerhard Richter painting: distorted, directionless, layered with memory and sound.

   Let’s see, I remember now.

4. Sam Amidon, Salt River

   I came to this record intrigued by its components: a cover of Ornette Coleman’s “Friends and Neighbors,” production by Sam Gendel (whose Music for Saxofone and Bass Guitar remains a favorite), and a Yoko Ono song for good measure. And yet it took a few spins to click (see: Geese, et al.).

   Once it did, I kept returning. 2025: the year of persistence.

   There is real depth here—old fiddle tunes and folk songs pressing against Gendel’s synthesizers. On first listen, the record doesn’t announce itself as especially deep, but it slowly magnetizes. The music seeps in, pulling you further with each pass. And if Amidon’s Coleman cover doesn’t quite reach the heights of the live version by 75 Dollar Bill from a few years back—well, very few things do.

   I’m drowning in the lonesome low / drowning in the lowland sea.

5. Gwenifer Raymond, Last Night I Heard the Dog Star Bark / William Tyler, Time Indefinite / Hayden Pedigo, I’ll Be Waving as You Drive Away

   Three beautiful and very different guitar records that resonated this year. Raymond plays a folk-rooted style undercut with drones and space. Tyler pivots from his recent work into a cosmic collage of found sounds, cassette loops, and baked-in melodies. Pedigo, completing a trilogy, marries meticulous technique with real expansiveness.

   Each unfolds at its own pace, in its own way—the specter of Jim O’Rourke drifting across all three—forming a rewarding blur of sounds known and unknown.

   Open-tuning a guitar in front of a quiet audience is like two friends saying goodbye and then walking away in the same direction.

   —Hayden Pedigo (Houston, November 16, 2025)

6. Anna Tivel, Animal Poem

   Another favorite from the year: poetic lyrics, warm melodies, and plenty of hooks. Her voice ricochets between Adrianne Lenker and Suzanne Vega. There’s a warmth to the recording—an aliveness—that settles over the songs. One to return to.

   And that song means everything.

7. Bill Callahan, What a Night!

   A new live record (via Bandcamp), following last year’s Resuscitate!. The two share overlapping setlists—and a titular exclamation point—but have very different energies. Here, Callahan performs only with Jim White on drums.

   The songs thrum, as expected, but what stands out is the telepathy between Callahan and White, especially on songs like “Drover.” Spare and intuitive. Necessary!

   I ended up in search of ordinary things.

8. Big Thief, “Incomprehensible”

   The album itself never quite grabbed me (yes, that really is the theme of the year), and the gig we saw felt oddly muted. We caught them on the final night of the tour at a venue where I had seen them play one of the greatest shows I had ever witnessed—only then it was indoors, not on the lawn. This time, everything felt a bit diffused.

   Except for this song, which rang out more clearly than its brothers and sisters: let me be.

   The pine trees are narrow, a billion broken arrows.

9. Frankie Reyes, Boleros Valses y Más (2016)

   This summer, in Atlanta for a friend’s birthday, the evening wound down after one of the more inventive home-based karaoke performances imaginable (including “Nick of Time,” no less). Someone put this record on, and time shifted.

   One of those albums that arrives at exactly the right moment. Ah, yes, says the slanted universe, this is what you need. Using an Oberheim synth, Reyes drifts through a range of Latin American songs, crafting a sound that floats between the past and some hazy middle distance just out of reach. The woozy soundtrack to summer.

   “It sounded interesting to me, so I took it further.”

   —Frankie Reyes (interview, 2021)

10. Rush, Maple Leaf Gardens, Toronto, March 24–25, 1981

    I spent a lot of nights in the car this semester, and on a whim I put on this live recording from the fortieth-anniversary edition of Moving Pictures. Rush was the soundtrack of my mid-teens; any honest look at my high-school cassette deck would confirm it. In high school, I even bought an early-1980s Rickenbacker bass in no small part because of this band.

    One of my first arena shows was Rush in San Antonio. The door quietly shut not long after, as my tastes shifted—but their music still pushes the memory button. This show sounded perfect: a balance of earlier prog explorations and the tightened songs of 1980–81 (about as old as that bass).

    A core music-video memory of mine remains “Tom Sawyer,” filmed at Le Studio in rural Quebec—Rush blasting through whatever that song is about against the snowy Laurentian Mountains. It captured something their music often doesn’t get credit for: the warmth of a band playing together in seclusion. Their Basement Tapes. Their Get Back.

    I didn’t open the door more than a crack. One night was enough. But for that night, it all came flooding back.

    

    Always hopeful, yet discontent.

On to 2026.

Watch the interview here:

Infinity Goes Up on Trial - Bob Dylan's Art and Ideas

“I knew a little bit about history, too –” : A Conversation with Court Carney

Many of the iconic images from Dylan’s early career, those which have shaped the public’s perception of him, depict him playing in a Greenwood, Mississippi, field with Pete Seeger, alongside civil rights volunteers, at the Newport Folk Festival, and during the March on Washington before Martin Luther King delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech. Indeed, D…

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9 months ago · 12 likes · 2 comments · Erin C. Callahan and Court Carney

Much of the early part of our conversation focused on that Dylan class. I’ve taught Dylan before, but usually through a straightforward chronological lens aligned with post-1945 U.S. history. This time, however, I wanted something different. We used Dylan primarily to think about how music is historicized and how Dylan himself functions—sometimes deliberately, sometimes obliquely—as a historian of American song. The students worked less on “Dylan’s career arc” and more on deconstructing his music as historians. Their main project asked them to examine Dylan as a songwriter who grapples with the past, interprets cultural memory, and reframes history.

I should add here that despite higher ed being wildly challenging right now, with new demoralizing developments every week, I was fortunate to have a wonderful group this semester: engaged, funny, thoughtful, and eager. It is easy to lose heart amid all the needless damage inflicted on university life, but the classroom still has its moments of scholarly joy.

One of their other assignments asked them to write on a series of films: Dont Look Back, I’m Not There, Inside Llewyn Davis, and A Complete Unknown. It was gratifying to see students—many of whom had little or no prior exposure to Dylan—so moved by these films (our screening of I’m Not There even ended in applause). Their response to A Complete Unknown was especially intriguing; as Erin and I discussed, they viewed it more critically than I expected. The classroom is always full of surprises.

I have seen A Complete Unknown a number of times now. I certainly see its various cracks and flaws, but my connection to the film comes down to how James Mangold, its director, encapsulates its core idea:

“The first time I sat down with [Dylan],” Mangold says, “Bob said, ‘What’s this movie about, Jim?’ I said, ‘It’s about a guy who’s choking to death in Minnesota, and leaves behind all his friends and family and reinvents himself in a brand new place, makes new friends, builds a new family, becomes phenomenally successful, starts to choke to death again—and runs away.’

Dylan took all of that in, and smiled. ‘I like that,’ he said.”1

This quote always seemed to orbit the other magnetic pole of our class: Dylan and the idea of home, rambling, and self-invention. Nearly every week, we ended up back at two touchstones: Dylan’s Nobel Lecture and the importance of The Odyssey (Laura!), and his opening interview in Scorsese’s No Direction Home (that title!):

“I was born very far from where I’m supposed to be, and so I’m on my way home.”2

There are many reasons I return so often to Dylan, but this tension between escape and return is a significant one. As someone who was adopted at birth—and who has been thinking more deliberately about this part of my life in recent years—I feel these themes on multiple levels. These questions of adoption, home, and identity also undergird the Mad Men narrative I kept pushing with Erin—but that’s a separate memory project for another day.

In any case, it was a genuinely great class, and I will miss it and them.

As Erin and I kicked around possible topics, I kept suggesting we lean into some Paul McCartney hot takes. And since I have been wanting to write an essay on Paul anyway, our conversation felt like a good place to start. Without revisiting my whole take on the show in San Antonio (my hometown—it is all a circle), I want to focus on what struck me in the setlist—and why it has stayed with me.

Before getting to the visual center of the night, it is worth noting the spectral presence of John Lennon throughout the show. I expected the “I’ve Got a Feeling” duet, and it was genuinely moving—Paul turning away from the crowd to look up as John’s image appeared. “Here Today,” too. But Lennon kept resurfacing in places I didn’t anticipate: “Now and Then,” the new “Threatles” song; the decision to open with “Help!”; and even “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!,” a song with such a distinctly Lennon origin story. Paul could have slotted in “Fixing a Hole” or “Lovely Rita,” but he chose songs that emphasized the largeness of John within his own story.

It felt less like nostalgia (and there is plenty of nostalgia at a show like this one) and more like a reckoning—Paul tracing the shape of an absence in ways both obvious and subtle.

Where the show became most interesting, though, was the middle section. Paul reached back to the Quarrymen’s “In Spite of All the Danger” and “Love Me Do,” both performed against a backdrop of an old house that read as timeworn rural South—I kept thinking it looked like a Cajun album cover from the 1960s—or even, from the right perspective, a haunted mansion. It is also a blood red tableau. I have no idea where this house comes from or whether it’s simply a graphic created for the tour, but it is an evocative image: familiar and unfamiliar at once. In a set structured around looking back—the tour is called “Got Back”—the house becomes a visual thesis statement—music as both a memory palace and a place you once left behind. The whole Got Back idea suddenly feels literal: return, reflection, revision.

My favorite moment came before the show, as a promo for the forthcoming documentary Man on the Run played on the arena screens. The ad features a beautiful Linda McCartney photograph of Paul in Scotland, in all his stoned-and-recuperating glory. Then the image blurred—a fuzzed loop of Paul slipping in and out of focus. Something about it tickled me: a refraction test of two Pauls. Is this one clearer, or this one? One is Linda looking at Paul; the other is Paul looking at himself in the mirror in his post-Beatles haze.

But beneath the humor, there is something deeply resonant in this image of escape: McCartney fleeing to Campbeltown to shed one version of himself; Dylan heading to Woodstock to piece together another; Don Draper driving through the night to California, unsure of who he even was pretending to be. As time goes on, I find myself increasingly drawn to these pop-cultural narratives of retreat and reinvention—artists disappearing to find the version of themselves that can keep going.

Paul might as well have launched into “Two of Us”: “we’re on our way home.”

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With Paul, what you respond to is often what you believe about art: sentiment vs. sincerity, play vs. craft, intimacy vs. performance. He is as (un)revealing as a cracked mirror. But what I keep circling back to—from Dylan’s Nobel Lecture to Paul standing in front of that anonymous house (and yes, Draper trying to square all those fictions embedded in fictions)—is this concept of home as a process of becoming rather than as something static and fixed. Dylan and his framing of home as the eternal search, the forever ramble. Paul and his long, winding road. Both carry that tension between reinvention and return, between flight and foundation. Maybe that’s why teaching Dylan still feels vital and why watching Paul trace the outline of his past felt unexpectedly moving.

Finally, since the conversation with Erin was slated to run in December, we found ourselves talking a bit about Christmas records—Dylan’s Christmas from the Heart, naturally, and a brief detour into Norah Jones’s I Dream of Christmas. As a show note, here’s the Ray Padgett interview I mentioned; it’s well worth the read:

Flagging Down the Double E's

Inside the 'Christmas in the Heart' Sessions

A Bob Dylan Christmas album. It seemed like a joke until it wasn’t…

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3 years ago · 89 likes · 22 comments · Ray Padgett

Here’s to finals week, to Dylan introducing a new slate of tour dates, to the underappreciated strength of Wings, to Norah Jones singing, “I wanna be a Jolly Jones,” and here’s to all of you.

1. Galaxie 500, “Moonshot” (Peel Sessions)

This cover of a Buffy Sainte-Marie song kept coming to the surface on walks. I tend to do deep dives of artists on these walks, so I had listened to nothing but Galaxie 500 for weeks. I originally wanted to make it the start of a travel playlist, but it never made much sense in terms of where I was or where I was going. But I did start three playlists with it, which went nowhere. The second song, in each case, was “First it was a movie, then it was a book,” by Florry, which still works as a setup. Anyway, sometimes it is not the time for playlists—the real song of the summer.

I actually ran into Dean Wareham in the lobby of a Fairfield Inn in Tulsa last week, as one does, but I didn't get a chance to ask him about this song, especially since he was lugging his bag to reception. Next time.

Up into outer space you go my friends

We wish you bon voyage

2. J.M.W. Turner, “A Distant View of Chambéry, from the North, with Storm Clouds” (1836)

The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, had this watercolor on display as part of a nicely curated exhibition titled “Picturing Nature: The Stuart Collection of 18th- and 19th-Century British Landscapes and Beyond.” I kept returning to this piece throughout its run—though it is part of the museum’s collection—and each time came away thinking this one held on to secrets. There is a dreamlike, blurred energy to the painting as it straddles a real scene—he was traveling through the Alps—or, at least, a perceived landscape painted days or weeks later (there seems to be some conflict as to where/when the painting was made). A sort of drifting between an I am here and an I was there, without really committing to either.

3. The Beach Boys, “Sloop John B,” Knebworth (1980)

My original idea for a Substack piece in the wake of Brian Wilson’s death was an essay on the Beach Boys in 1980. I didn’t know that period of their career very well, but someone posted a clip of the band playing “Sloop John B,” which sounded truly great. This tour was the last time that Brian, Carl, and Dennis (with Mike Love, Al Jardine, and Bruce Johnston) would perform as a group. But they weren’t a nostalgic act, at least not yet. Brian was in his late 30s (he had just turned 38 and the band sings “Happy Birthday” later in the show), but he seemed from a different time—you can hear the band excited for him to be there and sing. At Knebworth, that first verse of “Sloop John B” is all Brian, and I listened to this performance about two dozen times in the days after his death. Also, Carl sounds wonderful during this period, not to mention his killer Riviera electric 12-string (and wearing his equally killer timestamped green satin windbreaker).

4. The Grateful Dead, “He’s Gone” (July 8, 1987, Roanoke, VA)

In the car on one of those interminable summer afternoons, where you have a couple of errands, but they begin to feel impossible because of the snarl of both the heat and the traffic, so you quietly decide to ditch them, even if they were supposed to be fun in the first place, I flipped through to the Grateful Dead channel, which is usually an all-or-nothing proposition. But they were playing this version of “He’s Gone,” so I stayed. 1987 is a curious year for them—simultaneously rebuilding after Jerry’s health problems and hitting their height of mainstream popularity with In the Dark—but they still fired on all cylinders when they could. This show was one of a couple of one-off dates between shows with Bob Dylan that summer.

Lost one round, but the prize wasn’t anything,

A knife in the back and more of the same.

5. “That's three; nobody should have more than one talent.”

   1. Anthony Minghella, The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999)

   2. Todd Haynes, Carol (2015)

   3. John Lurie, The History of Bones

   4. Jeffrey Wright, “On Basquiat” (Criterion Channel)

   5. Tony Rayns, “Commentary,” Chungking Express (Criterion Channel)

Scrolling through the Criterion Channel earlier this summer, I happened to land on The Talented Mr. Ripley, based on the novel by Patricia Highsmith, which I hadn’t seen probably since it came out. A few weeks later, in a hotel room in Santa Fe, I caught the last third of Carol, based on The Price of Salt by Patricia Highsmith, a film I had never seen before but now see as one of the most beautiful representations of mid-century America on screen. Between these two films, I had been reading off-and-on John Lurie’s memoir The History of Bones, a book that probably works best depending on your patience for heroin. Anyway, after finishing that book, I stumbled upon Jeffrey Wright’s interview about his first major film, Basquiat, which struck another nice note of resonance (Lurie and Basquiat had a fractured relationship). All of these different strands that developed out of thin air and then converged into one. The Highsmith bridge folds into the Lurie bridge, collapsing very different works of art into one. And finally, a reminder of what we lost in that brief shining moment of DVD extras: the Criterion Channel features commentary tracks of various films, and I highly recommend the one for Chungking Express, which helps situate it regarding Hong Kong cinema as well as points out some nice elements I had never noticed before.

6. Wes Anderson, The Phoenician Scheme (2025)

I ended up seeing this film (featuring, of course, Jeffrey Wright) three times in the theater in rapid succession. The first time I felt underwhelmed, it was almost as if I had missed something big. For Anderson heads, note that I think Asteroid City is one of his great films, for context. I saw it again, in a near-empty theater, a few days later, and liked it so much more this time that I thought, “Did I sleep through the first screening?” And for good measure, and the fact that it was summer, I saw it a third time, this time in a completely empty theater, because why not. I still don’t think it rises to the level set by Asteroid City and its twists and turns of what is public and private and scripted and improvised and dreamt and invented, but the opening overhead shot is top-tier scored by Stravinsky’s “Apotheosis” (with the LP in the corner) as are the scenes set in the black-and-white afterlife. And the ending word of dialogue, as del Toro and Threapleton play cards, is a nice touch.

8. Plants and Baseball and Cassettes

This section/season of my life deserves much more explanation and context than I can provide here. Still, much of the summer has been spent focusing on gardening, attending baseball games, and listening to cassettes. I realize that for many of you, none of this is worth mentioning, but it is so far removed from where I have been in my life that it feels like the creation of a new belief system. I love that I am so apologetic when I tell people about this latest turn. Both because it seems like I am describing the most ancient of hobbies and pleasures to people who have long known them, but also because the connecting tissue of these interests is at once obvious and mysterious. But that is for another day.

9. Ian Leslie, John and Paul: A Love Story in Songs (2025)

Every time you might think we have enough books on The Beatles, one comes along that reorients how you consider the group. A touching and deeply felt book, John and Paul is up there with Rob Sheffield’s Dreaming the Beatles, in terms of a book that forces you to reimagine songs and stories that you know, or thought you knew, in your bones. Leslie also reinforces something I often think about: how the “Get Back” sessions offered a period of (un)conscious historicizing for the group, and how brief that gap really was between the excitement of discovering how to write that very first song and the wearying slog of a dissolving band. Necessary.

“When did music become so important?”

—Don Draper

“It’s always been important.”

—Megan Draper

Ten years ago this week, I found myself in the emergency room of a New Orleans hospital after several unimaginably painful days. Emergency rooms are rarely dull, especially in New Orleans at one o’clock in the morning. There, in a darkened exam room, a quiet refuge within the chaos, the issue became clear: pancreatitis caused by gallstones. Thus, I was admitted to the hospital, a damaged stranger in a damaging, strange land. In a moment of clarity, however, I realized there was a more pressing concern. Did this hospital room have a working television, and did it carry AMC? Even in the haze of highly welcome opioids, I knew that I needed to find a way to access the final episode of Mad Men. I had my priorities.

After seven seasons, Mad Men snaked toward its conclusion, “Person to Person,” airing on May 17th, 2015. Thus, on morphine, I watched (mostly) the end of the series that has come to define me more than I sometimes like to admit. More than a show, Mad Men became a framework for understanding myself, whether I like it or not. I have spent a lot of time with this show. I taught a university course using it to explore postwar American culture, emphasizing how memory both makes and destroys the past. I (briefly) ran an Instagram page focused on various aspects of the show. And, of course, the name of this page comes from the show. I have several writing projects related to Mad Men in the works, but I wanted to commemorate this date in some manner since it seems at once like yesterday and three dissolving lifetimes ago.

To that end, I wanted to highlight my favorite song-related moments of the show. Mad Men, particularly in its later seasons, perfected how music could work in a series. The music featured in the show usually worked on several levels as it anchored the scene to a specific time and reflected the emotional tenor of the episode. But more often, the music worked to create exquisitely layered punctuation marks to episodes. Matthew Weiner, the show’s creator, came from The Sopranos, which had its own list of indelible musical moments. Besides, you know, the most famous musical cut-off on television, The Sopranos had Tony singing along to Steely Dan’s “Dirty Work” and (in my favorite musical moment) Christopher desecrating “If I Were a Carpenter.”

With music, however, Mad Men went much further than other shows. The series starts with Don Cherry’s “Band of Gold,” a song slyly redolent of marriage and cigarette filters, and ends eight years later with the New Seekers teaching the world to sing (and selling them a Coke). Between those bookends, the show featured dozens of popular songs to further/deepen the narrative, including a rare use of The Beatles’ “Tomorrow Never Knows,” which cost the show a reported quarter of a million dollars. By Seasons Five and Six, the show was operating at such an intoxicating peak that almost every episode was soundtracked to something profoundly moving.

There are plenty more great moments, but these are the ones that help define how well the show used music or just stuck with me.

• Bob Dylan, “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” (“The Wheel,” Season One, 2007)

  A thesis statement. The moment when the show came together. The Dylan song shows up at the very end of Season One, after the infamous carousel pitch about nostalgia. The way the show is able to show a fractured “what might have been” narrative (“It ain’t no use to sit and wonder why, Don”). And yes, the scene is set months before the song was written. I have always thought the use of the Decemberists later in Season Two was a declarative response to the online grumbling about the anachronistic use of the song and that Weiner was arguing that he could pull whatever he wanted. Also, The Cardigans show up in the second episode of the series, so I suppose the non-dogmatic approach was always right there.

• Perry Como, “Blue Room” (“Three Sundays,” Season Two, 2008)

  I have always liked this scene—a rare domestic quietness in Ossining (not to mention bartender Sally’s near-transparent Bloody Marys). This song is often confused online as being performed by Bing Crosby (who did a more up-tempo version a few years after Como), most likely because of the comment about his voice making everything sound like Christmas.

• Roy Orbison, “Shahdaroba” (“Shut the Door. Have a Seat.” (Season Three, 2009)

  The montage juxtaposition of Don starting a new company and Betty in full-ambiguity mode with her new life. A direct line back to “The Wheel.”

• Simon and Garfunkel, “Bleecker Street” (“The Suitcase,” Season Four, 2010)

  The foggy, shrouded capstone to arguably the single best episode of the show (which sits at the exact center of the series).

• The Lovin’ Spoonful: “Butchie’s Tune” (“Commissions and Fees,” Season Five, 2012)

  Soundtracking Draper letting Glenn Bishop drive back to school. The story goes that the first jet plane to fly into Nacogdoches, TX, where I teach, carried the Lovin’ Spoonful to a gig in town. “Don't give me a place for my memories to stay.”

• Nancy Sinatra, “You Only Live Twice” (“The Phantom,” Season Five, 2012)

  The entire show in miniature.

  “Are you alone?”

• Paul Mauriat, “Love is Blue” (“The Flood,” Season Six, 2013)

  The stunning instrumental version of "L'amour est bleu,” Luxembourg’s Eurovision entry in 1967. This episode manages to bring together a thoughtful sideways take on April 1968. It also features the underrated exchange between Roger and Randall (“I had forgotten that.”)

• Sergio Mendes, “Goin’ Out of My Head” (“The Crash,” Season Six, 2013)

  This scene/song does not get discussed as much as the others, but it underscores such a hard truth about Don and his relationship with Sylvia. The rare look at Don’s desperation. But the way this scene is filmed: the claustrophobia of the rear hallway, the click of Don’s footsteps, the muffled taps against the door, the song coming into and out of aural focus as the camera moves between the hallway into the kitchen, the gentle resting of the head against the door. A muted symphony of heartache.

• Judy Collins, “Both Sides Now” (“The Quality of Mercy,” Season Six, 2013)

  Another thesis statement (along with the use of The Zombies’ “This Will Be Our Year” later in Season Seven) on Don’s connection to Sally and the past and honesty and authenticity. Maybe a bit on the nose, which the series rarely did, but it works exceedingly well.

• The Vanilla Fudge, “You Keep Me Hangin’ On” (“Time Zones,” Season Seven, 2014)

  Don’s unraveling. “Set me free, why don't you, babe?”

• Honorable mentions: “Telstar,” by The Tornados, and Kyu Sakamoto’s “Sukiyaki,” both in Season Two, and “I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times,” soundtracking Roger’s LSD trip in Season Five.

Finally, it is easy to see the final scene of the show (Don in all white sitting in a television version of Esalen) as a cynical soda pop note on consumerism, but I never saw it that way—even on morphine. Ten years on, and minus a gallbladder, I see the show’s larger arc as a delicate and dense dissertation on identity and the search (however unending) for home (however incomplete). Don, in lotus position, understood: “New day. New ideas. A new you.”

“A watch that ticks is wrapped around my wrist.”

—Jeff Tweedy

At some point in the late 2000s, early in my tenure as an Assistant Professor and inspired by my colleague Robert, I started a subscription to the New York Review of Books. Robert and I built most of our conversations around this magazine. As we both routinely taught evening classes at the time, I have fond memories of our discussions amid the East Texas darkness. I remember two specific conversations to this day: one about Bruce Chatwin, who had shown up in some sort of context, and one about an essay by Zadie Smith. This piece, “Killing Orson Welles at Midnight,” centered on a film by Christian Marclay called The Clock. This twenty-four-hour art piece fuses clips of clocks (and other references to time) from hundreds of films into a monument to the infinite patterns of our days. Or, as Smith writes, “The Clock is a twenty-four-hour movie that tells the time.”[1]

Clearly there are two types of time, real and staged. There are a few ways to say that. Accidental clocks versus deliberate clocks. Time that has been caught on film versus time that has been manipulated for film.

I have thought about this essay over the years more than I would like to admit. Partly because I knew I would never see the film, partly because it seemed like such an audacious experiment, and partly because I could not quite comprehend the monumental task of finding the references and bringing them together in chrono-coherence. This final part is amusing on the surface since the clips should just be tacked to the clock, and there is your narrative. But something else seemed to be happening with this film. At any rate, the essay wormed its way into my brain. In November 2023, I had the chance to ask Zadie about this essay after one of her readings for The Fraud. When I told her I could not quite shake one of her essays from a dozen years earlier, she responded, “Uh oh.” But she lit up when I mentioned The Clock, and she talked about its continued resonance in part precisely because of its lack of, maybe its impossibility, of being screened again.

Then, this past November, the Museum of Modern Art brought The Clock back to life with an exhibition of the film (which runs until February)—including a handful of twenty-four-hour screenings. And this last week, as I was in New York City, I was finally able to experience at least sections of the piece—a screening almost 13 years in the making. The Clock was both exactly what I had anticipated and even more interesting in terms of craft. The way Marclay and his team stitched together longer clips to move the hands, so to speak, kept intriguing me. A fantastic clip of Charles Bronson in flared trousers, for example, is allowed to run for a bit before he checks his pulse against his wristwatch. At other points, Peter Faulk (who appears again and again) comes and goes. There is a bit of a game in the film as you wonder what scene will click into place. But on a deeper level, there lies a rather deconstructed question of narrative—as if each of the pieces no longer has storylines of their own and instead works only as markers of the passing of minutes.

A certain dread shadows the film, both in the sense that the genres most often included were dark—thrillers rely on the clock for suspense way more than comedies—and, of course, the slipping away of your own time as each minute elapsing is showcased. On one level, it is the arthouse equivalent of one of those horrifying calendars that feature 100 years of weeks as empty blocks, and you are to tick them off as each new Sunday rolls into view. Nerve-wracking.

Made with pre-iPhone source material, The Clock also is casually dismissive of every generation’s admonishment that we are currently too time-dependent since it’s clear the evolution of film hinges on time and timekeeping, whether it’s Harold Lloyd in 1923 or Christopher Lloyd in 1985.[2] Time exists mainly in analog here, and I think I noticed only a couple of digital clocks (one, a microwave; another, a clock radio) in my viewings. More obviously, so much of The Clock exists in the world of trains, various modes of transportation, and the public space of the clock tower. These liminal spaces intersected by furtive glances, severe clocks, worried grimaces, and the noir shadows of the everyday. It is an intoxicating film.

Walking out, I asked a staff member if he had seen the entire film. He replied he had only (only!) seen eighteen or so hours overall. He said he had a love-hate relationship with the whole thing, but overall, he thought it was all necessary: a wildly experiential moment.

What has stuck with me most, however, is the literal craft of the film. Is there an actual beginning, or is it some digital loop? How was it physically constructed, sure, but also how is it screened? Are there various drafts? And on and on. The physicality and archive of The Clock loom more in my brain now than the purported subject.

I saw The Clock on January 2^nd as the New Year memes drifted past. One that always shows up on my feed is a scene from the Season Seven premiere of Mad Men (titled “Time Zones,” naturally), which starts with the sudden reappearance of Freddy Rumsen (last seen a few seasons earlier) staring directly out at the viewer and intoning:

“Are you ready? Because I want you to pay attention. This is the beginning of something.”

He is pitching an ad for Accutron wristwatches, but the framing works as a nod to the beginning of the show’s end and a setup for Don Draper’s return (as we soon discover that he is feeding Freddy the lines). The ticking clock thus serves as the backdrop to Draper trying to figure out a path forward (“Do the work, Don”).

Early last year, someone pointedly asked me if what I did was even history, which, at the time, I took as a dig at the work I was doing with Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan, and the rest. As a cultural historian, I have often received criticism about topics I wrote and taught, but this comment rattled me, though not perhaps in the ways intended. What I now presume was just one more note of dismissiveness added to the pile now serves as a notch on whatever yardstick delineates my career. I am proud of my work generally and of the Forrest book (a book incidentally that I was finalizing the page proofs when the question was proposed), which is as deeply researched and sourced as anything I will probably ever write. Throughout the year, with time, I came to see “Do you even write history” (derogatory) as something more interesting and curious--replacing the dismissiveness with a sense of actually, I don’t know. Perhaps, then: “Do you even write history?” (celebratory).

In the classroom, the easiest definition of history for students is often the study of “change over time.” That’s it. It kind of sums up the whole deal. Pithy, though the statement obliterates the complex timelines embedded within. But telling students on the first (or last) day of class that we haven’t broached the cosmic riddle of linear time seems harsh when most of them just want to know if it will be on the midterm. And yet, we make sure our watch is in time with the rhythms of some larger, more established keeper of time. In the afternoon section of The Clock, in particular, so many actors are seen checking their watches against the authoritative voice of some larger timepiece. We judge the discrepancies on our end while ignoring the incongruities created by the city clock. All in an attempt to find our coordinates—to plot ourselves upon some unknowable graph. As the spaces between the perception of Now and whatever agreed upon authentic Now spin out in infinite circles of almost’s and not quite’s, asking, “Do you even write history?” seems like the smallest question in the world.

Bill Callahan, as always, understands:

And I set my watch

Against the city clock

It was way off

Happy New Year.

[1]Zadie Smith, “Killing Orson Welles at Midnight,” New York Review of Books, April 28, 2011.

[2]“In ‘The Clock’ there are a few flip phones, but that’s about it,” Marclay said. “It was really pre-iPhone madness. But when we started showing it, people were comparing it to their phone, introducing that element of real time in the cinema.” Marc Tracy, “‘The Clock’ Revisits New York. Is It Still of Our Time?” The New York Times, November 15, 2024.

1. The Ballad of Jim White

I listened to one record more than any other this year by a clear margin: Bill Callahan’s Resuscitate!, a live album recorded in March of last year. With the inimitable Jim White on drums, his band conjures a forever sound that would not leave me. It never served as background noise, either; I fell into those songs every time. It is a gorgeous, meaningful record to return to again and again.

The record I listened to the most after Resuscitate! was the Dirty Three’s Love Changes Everything, my (non-live) record of the year if I were ranking such things. This record crept up on me, but once it hit, it hit. There is so much to say about the various interlocking pieces held together by, ahem, Jim White, but it works both as individual compositions as well as a holistic piece.

I also loved the Hard Quartet record, released with a fair amount of hype and expectation as “supergroups” go. Still, it came together as a crunchy guitar vibe (recommended for the MJ Linderman fans) with strong hooks and solid songs. Malkmus gets the headlines, but the whole endeavor coheres because of, you guessed it, Jim White. I would not have imagined my favorite song of the year was entitled “Six Deaf Rats,” but here we are.

• Bill Callahan, Resuscitate!

• Dirty Three, Love Changes Everything

• The Hard Quartet, The Hard Quartet

• Jim White, All Hits: Memories

2. The Return to Jazz

In January, I stumbled upon a listening project documenting an exploration of jazz musicians and records I did not know very well. That was the goal, though it mutated in scope and frankly began to hem me in as these things tend to do. At any rate, I documented all of these explorations on Instagram for those inclined to look at terrible handwriting. Despite any why-do-I-continue-to-task-myself-this-way reservations, the whole process reignited my interest in jazz.1 I found new favorites and eras of interest (there was so much great jazz produced in this two-year period in the early 1970s). Joe Henderson’s records crystallized a lot of this journey for me. I knew him and some of his work, but I totally fell into it this year. His The Elements and, especially, In Japan were in constant rotation throughout the year.

Anyway, two great reissues and a beautiful live record by one of the best groups out there:

• Joe Henderson: Power to the People

• Alice Coltrane: The Carnegie Hall Concert

• Jeff Parker: The Way Out of Easy

3. “It Can’t Be Denied”: Live Music

I saw less live music this year than in years past, or at least it felt that way, but the shows I saw seemed more significant and monumental. I left the King Gizzard show—featuring the band’s multiple overlapping clusters of followers—thinking that was pretty much the epitome of a shared musical experience. Seeing Wilco across five nights, two cities, with 98 unique songs (and 165 total songs), capped off the year in ways I should write about at some point. Going into a Dylan show with any expectations is silly and defeating, so I just imagined I would not get to experience his version of Johnny Cash’s “Big River,” which he had in semi-regular rotation last spring. But I did—and it was a moment of communal joy. And yes, in May, I got to witness The Eras tour in all its glory in Sweden. “All Too Well” was the obvious highlight, but I found the opening spectacle of the audience and the music of “Cruel Summer” to be very moving. I kept returning this year to the idea of vulnerability: being vulnerable as an act of resistance perhaps, but also documenting those moments of emotional openness and how live music plays such a heavy role here, not to mention the shared aspect of the whole endeavor.

• Wilco: 12/6 (Austin)

  • “Remember the Mountain Bed”

  • “Everyone Hides” (in a new, weird acoustic Grateful Dead arrangement)

• King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard: 11/16 (Houston)

  • “Dripping Tap”

• Bob Dylan: 4/6 (Austin)

  • “Big River” (with Jimmie Vaughan)

• Taylor Swift: 5/19 (Solna, Sweden)

  • “Cruel Summer”

  • “All Too Well (Ten Minute Version)”

• Brent Best: 8/3 (Galveston)

  • “Pinball Song”

4. Uncollected: Archival Releases:

A couple of months ago, I put on Spell Blanket, a collection of raw demos from Broadcast, a band whose career was cut short by the untimely death of Trish Keenan. Her voice is the key to this collection (some songs, but really a jumble of snippets of melody, of words), though it is impossible to separate the fragments from the larger story of loss. At any rate, this record soundtracked, often without me even realizing it, a rather difficult and challenging few months.

The unreleased bits on Uncollected Noise—the rest were either on singles/reissues and/or collected on the Rykodisc box released 28(!) years ago—are the charmers here. However, the entire record is a stunning reminder of what this band could do. Vital.

• Broadcast, Spell Blanket: Collected Demos, 2006-2009

• Galaxie 500, Uncollected Noise: New York ’88-‘90

5. Favorite Opening Lines

“She put on Astral Weeks

Said, ‘I love jazz,’ and winked at me

This is the last place I oughta be”

—Father John Misty, “Josh Tillman and the Accidental Overdose”

“I don’t know where I am / And I don’t care”

—Kim Deal, “Nobody Loves You Anymore”

“Some say distance grows the heart / But I know / Sometimes we just drift apart”

—MJ Lenderman, “You Don’t Know the Shape I’m In”

“Way up on the Erie, they like their chops so fat / I’ve seen the League of Women lick their fingers like a cat”

—Gillian Welch, “The Day the Mississippi Died”

“I walked all night to ‘The Killing Moon’ / Got to get it right, got to get it right and soon”

—Bill Ryder-Jones, “This Can’t Go On”

“Once a buncha times, I took it to heart / Everything you told me, I took it apart”

—Adrianne Lenker, “Once a Bunch”

“I was a galleon for your raging love”

—The Hard Quartet, “Six Deaf Rats”

“Life is, it’s never what you think it is for”

—Jessica Pratt, “Life Is”

I want to return, finally, to Callahan, who served as the poet laureate for so much of my 2024. His words ricocheted across the peaks and valleys of the year, and I dipped into lyrics like any other book of wisdom. The meaning of these lyrics would change, shadowing whatever events happened to be impactful. But it was also interesting to see how certain songs would give up new secrets. His “Drover,” for instance, originally from 2011, has any number of quotable lines, but this year one verse in particular kept rattling me:

I set my watch

Against the city clock

It was way off

The way he sings it on Resuscitate! gives it a renewed sense of urgency: the magic of the quotidian tinged with the mystical. I cannot precisely explain the significance of these words, but they made me smile each time I heard them in a “of course” sort of way. Here’s to our attempt to synchronize the personal to the communal as we stumble toward the cosmic reset of a new year.

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Nathan Bedford Forrest cast a long shadow across the South. Before the Civil War, Forrest traded enslaved individuals and families. During the Civil War, he commanded various sizes of Confederate forces and was the commander at the massacre of Black Union soldiers at Fort Pillow in 1864. After the Civil War, Forrest led the first incarnation of the Ku Klux Klan. He covers a lot of ground, much of it rutted and damaged by racism and violence.

Forrest’s public memory is shaped by two statues (one in Memphis erected in 1905, one outside of Nashville built in the 1990s) and by novels, biographies, films, advertisements, and countless allusions across the twentieth century. (In)famous in Tennessee, Forrest emerged as a national talking point in the 1990s through Shelby Foote’s starring role in Ken Burns’s massively popular documentary on the Civil War. Foote, with his anecdotes of bloody sabers and improbable feats of strength. In the 2010s, everything began to shift, and the Memphis statue came down in 2017. The Nashville statue followed a couple of years later. The book tells these stories.

As I write in the book—and discuss in the interview posted below—I have lived with Forrest for a long time. I first wrote a research paper on Fort Pillow in college, way back in the 1990s. A footnote at the end of that essay led to my Master’s Thesis. In the early 2000s, I published much of this research in an article in the Journal of Southern History. I knew there was a larger story there, but in the meantime, I wrote my dissertation on jazz in the 1920s and worked to find academic employment. Forrest rarely strayed from my mind, however, and I committed to writing the book during the pandemic. By then, the statues had come down, and a stronger narrative arc for the book emerged.

I am proud of this book, of the research that went into it, and of the writing. A whole other story could be told here of research and writing and the mechanics of academia, but for now, I will say this stands as a testament to tenacity and proving the doubters (me included) wrong.

This Thursday, I will be part of a virtual book release hosted by LSU Press, where I will discuss the book in greater detail, and the audience can ask questions. The Press will be offering a nice discount on the book for those who particpate. Hopefully, much of the discussion will center on the weird history of Forrest and Tom Hanks. The link for the book release is here.

Also, a few weeks ago, I got to sit down with my dear friend and colleague, Erin C. Callahan, for a lengthy interview about the book and how we write about identity and memory. That interview (as well as her inventive series on Bob Dylan, broadly defined) can be found here.

As always, I am available for classroom talks (in person or via Zoom) on my research and historical methods. Please email me at carneycp@sfasu.edu.

The LSU Press page is here.

Finally, here is the link to purchase the book.

And the sunshine fund was low

Thirty years ago today, Guided By Voices released Bee Thousand, their seventh (!) record, but the first one to have widespread marketing. I bought it the day it came out. I had just turned twenty, finished my sophomore year in college, and lived in Waco, Texas. That year was spent fostering a hopeless crush on a woman, as you do at 20. A few months earlier, Reality Bites had come out, and however you may feel about that movie now, Ethan Hawke was Ethan Hawke, and Winona Ryder was Winona Ryder. A friend and I left the theater, and I was like, could anyone be cooler than (clearly unwell and toxic) Troy Dyer? But if you squinted, my hair was a similar length, and I happened to have a shirt similar to his during the torrid Hey, That’s My Bike denouement. My friend helpfully suggested I borrow some of his hair pomade to complete the look.

It was a delusional time.

I played (mostly bass guitar) in various bands then and was generally falling down an obvious hole of The Byrds, Gram Parsons, Big Star, Matthew Sweet, and Uncle Tupelo on the one hand, and a weird mix of They Might Be Giants, Yoko Ono, Charles Mingus, and Kate & Anna McGarrigle records on the other. Guided By Voices slid right into this record pile. I remember reading about them in all of the magazines that Spring and all of the references (The Who, The Kinks, etc.) were tailor-made for what I was listening to at the time. I love, too, looking back at those old reviews, how much Robert Pollard’s age (my god, he was 38!) and day job (my god, he taught fourth grade!) played into everything.

At any rate, Bee Thousand thrilled and stunned with one sun-slanted, time-blasted tune tumbling after another. The record has so many great melodies (twenty songs in 36 minutes) that it tends to dissolve into one gorgeous song. Most of the songs/song fragments breeze past in under two minutes, and the magnum opus just touches three. But “Smothered in Hugs” (what a title, what a melody) is one of those songs that refracts infinite stories out of words you can barely make out, much less grasp their literal meaning. I love all of the guitars on this record, but Pollard’s voice is the star, too, as he sings but I believed you here, or and shit yeah, it’s cool on “Echoes Myron,” or I know what’s right, on “I am a Scientist.” It’s all so great. And the best part of a lo-fi, out-of-time record in 1994 is that it resonates so clearly today.

Middle-aged Symphonies to God.

One piece of Court lore is that I worked at Toys “R” Us putting together swing sets the month this record came out. As fun as that sounds, it was also the summer of The Lion King, which meant I had to hear a near-continuous loop of “Circle of Life,” “Hakuna Matata,” and “Can You Feel the Love Tonight.” It's hard to imagine that was even a real moment in history, but I stand here as a witness (and still have my Geoffrey name tag in a box somewhere, as a tangible clue that some aspect of this story happened). Moving from it means no worries for the rest of your days to sitting out on your house, watching hardcore UFOs on the way home, was whiplash-inducing.

Another bit of Court lore is that one of the bands I played in was with the woman I had a crush on (and who by all accounts was unmoved by my hair pomade era)—it was a real unrequited Fleetwood Mac for 1990s Waco. At one of our gigs that summer, I chose—for reasons lost to time—to sing a song. I was not much of a singer, but somehow, I knew I had to play this particular Bee Thousand cut. So, my first live singing performance was in a weird coffee shop in Waco, Texas, where I sang “Awful Bliss.”1 I’m sure the tens of people there were thrilled. Again, I know this happened (though thankfully, no tape or wax cylinder exists of the evening), but as with the Toys “R” Us tale, it seems more like some invented memory passed down to me in whispers than an actual performance.

Hey, That’s My Bike had nothing on us.

That entire year was a transitional time, certainly in retrospect. I didn’t change my major or anything, though I think I was an Art History minor for three weeks. I was on the same basic path as I had been on and would continue to follow. But I do see 1994 as a particular moment of becoming. None of this suggests Bee Thousand or Guided By Voices as a dividing line bisecting youth and non-youth, non-knowledge and knowledge. No BGBV/AGBV, really. Still, this record has the ability to transport me back to those heady days of staple-gunned flyers and thinking tomorrow would be better or brighter.

This album remains one of those records that holds such personal talismanic power. It transports, across thirty years, to a moment that feels just as present and significant to me today. Now that I am a bit past Pollard’s age when he wrote these songs, it is as if the words and melodies of this record slashed out a map that I could not really make sense of back then, but could still intuit however faintly. And yet, it’s all right there. And it all still sounds amazing.    

I am a scientist, I seek to understand me

I am an incurable, and nothing else behaves like me

Everything is right

Everything works out right

Everything fades from sight

Because that's alright with me

Some recent moments that have wedged their way into my brain:

• Vampire Weekend // Only God Was Above Us

  well, that's a bleak sunrise

I realize talking about Vampire Weekend in 2024 may provoke some uncomfortable reactions. Their sound strikes at the heart of the Obama years, especially those heady early days when things seemed less horrifying for ten minutes at a stretch. Why not put on a Decemberists album and relive 2003, that moment when the map forward seemed a bit less smudged, a bit less charred. Hell, just put on that Disintegration cassette and really dig in by channeling 1989, when home as a concept struck a slightly more believable fiction. There is a quote that I sadly lost track of, but it goes like this: I can watch a film four or five times and see things I’ve missed—bits and pieces of details, scraps of embedded meaning. But with albums, some of which I have heard hundreds, maybe thousands of times, I can tell you where I was standing when I first listened to a song, what I was wearing, how I felt at that moment—the Proustian potential of pop. You hear a specific chiming guitar or a particular chord change, and whoosh, the past merges with the present, decades compressed into the infinity of now. The Shins tapped into this: “Lucked out, found my favorite record / Lying in wait at the Birmingham mall.” Which is a great line. I also had the exact same feeling in 1993. In a shopping mall. In Birmingham (Alabama, not the UK, which is where I always assumed Mercer is referring to). So when I hear this song (“Know Your Onion!”), I think of that moment when I found the record I had been looking for. Of course, now I also think back to last summer when I was riding the #48 bus in Seattle and made a playlist of the Shins on the fly. The layering of memories (re)colliding logarithmically.

The fun part is when nostalgia, or something nostalgically-adjacent, touches a song—like the dying embers of a childhood’s sunny Sunday afternoon (derogatory). Songs like Billy Joel’s “My Life” invoke such distress that I become queasy. I don’t have a working early memory of that song (I was only four when it came out), but something submerged in that track still haunts me. Weirdly, something similar happens (albeit in the opposite, more positive direction) when I hear “Lovefool” by the Cardigans. One can imagine that if a song I have no real working relationship with can stir such ripples, what happens with music that I do care about?

Anyway, Vampire Weekend has a new record that I keep returning to. And it’s catchy and woozy and deep and warped in all these meticulous ways. I didn’t expect it to hit as hard as it has, but here we are. Multiple hooks rotate through the record, and something new has caught my ear each time I listen. Maybe it will drift away into the playlists of the unremembered, but right now, its talons are jagged and sticky.

• Cindy Lee // Diamond Jubilee

  in a fantasy / a burning memory / of something true

A couple of years ago, I caught the end of a conversation with an indigenous activist on a local public access radio show. She was talking about an uncle’s band called Sugluk, a Canadian band that had recorded several singles in the mid-1970s. They were recorded in English and Inuktitut, and three of their tracks were included in the Native North America, Vol. 1 compilation by Light in the Attic. I failed to catch the band's name then, but I quickly Shazammed the song they played. It turns out it was “I Didn’t Know,” which I proceeded to listen to approximately one million times in the months after. The song isn’t much more than a garage groove, and it’s one of those recordings that is just so perfect in vibe and tone. About halfway through, there is a break with the requisite “2, 3, 4…” but the drummer sort of stumbles back in—he eventually gets it, but for a brief moment, it all threatens to fall apart. And then they’re back. The whole thing is so amazingly moving (the vocals and guitar, but also the exuberance and joy of playing together as a group) that I can be moved to tears just hearing that mid-song break(down). It’s also a scary reminder of how much music is out there that could change your life that you may never hear—just existing out there right beyond your grasp.

As a society, we seem to have fashioned an impossible situation where many of the old, imperfect ways of connecting to culture have been eradicated and replaced with wildly broken, if moderately convenient, methods that have forever distorted how we listen, watch, and read. None of this is new, and all of this was predicted in various ways over the years, yet here we are, tethered to an unwieldy streaming system that monetizes everything but the art. The idea that we now have to contend with AI poets instead of poets using AI to create poetry is the grand narrative of our time. And it is all depressing. Tech so quickly moved from “Cool, a new music gadget that I may or may not ever adopt” to “Hey, you now have infinite subscriptions to wildly unstable catalogs of material, now with ads” that it has erased our connection to what was expected just a few years ago. Some of this change is annoying on a large level (finding unaltered prints of certain “updated” and “CGI-enhanced” films), but a lot of it just irks on more minor everyday levels. Looking for records that had once been streaming, for example, and finding them removed, or just particular songs removed. We have lost so many things: liner notes, bonus material, DVD extras, good music compilations, among a lengthening list of other pieces of media tossed into the ether. Cultural erasure and amnesia pulsate out in radiating waves of loss.

I am sure nothing I am writing is particularly eyebrow-raising, and there are good cultural critics out there writing thoughtful and well-sourced paeans to what has been tossed off the sides of the boat. But I have thought a lot about the lack of weirdness today. The concept is that we had access to deep wells of eccentricity. Not everything was established for some ad revenue, but people made music and art that operated outside of expectation and money. And yes, plenty of people still do, of course, but culturally, we have made it almost impossible to access these subcultures on any wide scale or with any consistency. The destruction of alt-weeklies, zines, weird, unsponsored websites, etc., has made it near-impossible to collate something beyond what is mediated and packaged. The modern spaces where this art still percolated—Twitter, say, or TikTok—have been purposefully blown up by the digital goliaths to undermine further any easy (sub)cultural communication. Anyway, we need more weirdness. We need more strangeness. The documentary on Elephant 6, released a couple of years ago, offers such a beautiful meditation on many of these ideas. A time and place (Louisiana in the 1990s) so far removed from the current moment you might as well be talking about Coney Island in 1903.

All of that has been spinning around my brain for the past few months. And then Cindy Lee drops Diamond Jubilee. I first saw a reference to this record via a person I follow online who always posts really great jazz records I have never heard of, but then almost immediately, it was everywhere. The trick, of course, is accessing it. The record isn’t on any streaming sites nor exists (to my knowledge) in any physical form. It seems to exist only as a YouTube link via a GeoCities site. All of which is as confounding and beautiful as the music. It is, of course, quite ironic that as I lament the ubiquitous state of streaming, I also got annoyed that I could not easily access this music via Apple or Spotify. So is our cultural prison. Anyway, Diamond Jubilee is gorgeous and strange and otherworldy and curious and limitless. It is as if that one disintegrating moment in Sugluk’s “I Didn’t Know”: so human, so on edge, so fraught. All the possibilities in the world held in the hands of a drummer just trying not to fuck up the take. Breath holding. Breathtaking.

• Bob Dylan // Austin (April 6, 2024)

  the sun beat down upon the steps of time to light the way

I was fortunate to see Bob Dylan on his final night of the Rough and Rowdy Ways tour with friends old and new. This tour, which I suppose is now over, has been a masterclass in the distance between how a show looks through a setlist posted online and the performance itself. The setlist, with several key exceptions, has been pretty static, all things considered. Still, one leg got funny asides related to the location. Later, he replaced these bits with a series of place-specific covers. These tweaks have been great and fun to trace. But the core show itself (“Watching the River Flow,” “When I Paint My Masterpiece,” all of Rough and Rowdy Ways—minus one—and a bit of the gospel era) also changed throughout the years. Dylan played with arrangements (sometimes subtly, sometimes wildly), and the band membership shifted a bit, but looking at a setlist beforehand would show hardly any of these changes. As has been said repeatedly, Dylan is doing something so rare and unique right now regarding his age, stature, and musicality. I have seen a clutch of these shows throughout this tour, and they were all so wildly different in mood and vibe and music.

On this final night, I only wanted to hear “Big River,” which I assumed I’d miss, given concert karma and the mercurial conductor at the center of it all. He had played the Johnny Cash song over the past few weeks, but you never know. Going to a Dylan show with firm expectations for anything is a fool’s errand. The night seemed normal, but then we got Jimmie Vaughan guesting on half the set. This one addition shifted the gravity of the entire show and offered a unique look at the mechanics of Dylan’s show. Watching Tony teaching Jimmie the arrangements on the fly was one of the great concert experiences. It all came together on “Goodbye Jimmy Reed,” with Jimmie missing Dylan’s nod and Tony leaning over to yell, “Go!” Dylan seemed in high spirits throughout, but watching Jimmie learning the songs in real time was thrilling—at times, nerve-wracking (will he hit it?), at times, rousing (Dylan shows have eschewed much in the way of soloing this tour). But the very human tableau of learning arrangements in real-time and also sitting just off stage as regular rhythm guitarist Doug Lancio subbed back in for a couple of the slower songs was all very touching. Still, watching Tony negotiate Dylan while Bob Britt (the other ostensibly lead guitarist) watched his bandleader’s hands for any key/rhythmic changes was a masterclass in how all these pieces converge. Finally, beyond these changes, it is difficult to quantify what exactly Dylan has done with “Every Grain of Sand,” his set closer to this tour. A prayer? Something weirder? But that last blast of Bob’s harp lifts it into something even less definable. Stunning. Something to experience.

Oh, and yes, I got to hear (gladly, joyfully), “I taught the weeping willow how to cry…”

One for the ages.

A melancholic thesis statement of sorts threads through these three disparate thoughts, but at the same time, it’s enough for now to allow these ideas the space to collide and melt into one another.

Acknowledgments:

1. Any discussion of Dylan and setlists requires me to mention the book Erin C. Callahan and I edited: The Politics and Power of Bob Dylan’s Live Performances. Also, check out her new podcast/Substack: Infinity Goes Up On Trial.

2. As always, I am privileged to participate in the Million Dollar Bash regular roundtable at the Dylantantes.

3. Laura Tenschert listened to me complain about streaming and is always such a wonderful sounding board for all things Dylan. Also, Eralda Lameborshi helped assure me that not everything needs to be a thesis statement.

4. Finally, Ray Padgett has created and collated some of the finest discussions of the Rough and Rowdy Ways tour, among many other subjects.

In January 2022, I resolved to listen to more music more intently. I felt that I had drifted from any meaningful connection to music listening. Every month, I chose new and old records and spent time listening with some form of intention. I then typed them out as a record of what I had done. I posted these monthly throughout the year on Instagram, mainly for accountability, but it was nice to hear from a lot of folks each month with their own experiences, thoughts, etc. It is also nice to go back through those lists a year later and consider what I liked then, where I was, all of it. I knew, however, that I did not want to continue into 2023, lol.

The dilemma remains, however: how to listen?

At some point in my mid-30s—at the height of iTunes and before streaming took over—I hit this wall with new music. It seemed like a combination of a lot more music being accessible right as the traditional critical media (magazines, websites) began to implode. It all just seemed overwhelming in its underwhelmingness. And this was before the endlessness of streaming. But I also distinctly remember thinking: this can’t be it. And since then, I have continued to find a way forward with more expansive listening habits. Still, the how question seemed unanswerable. Different equipment, different speakers, different setups, it all seemed less than ideal. I don’t know. I am beginning to think it is something more significant than music and more about the consumption of culture—individually and collectively. It’s been a tough nut to crack.

This past semester, I taught my history of popular culture course for the first time in a few years. I usually begin this class—and thus frame much of the subsequent discussions throughout the semester—with a discussion of the U.S. in the 1890s and various tensions that give rise to modernity (demographic shifts, technological innovations, various forms of expansion, the rise of cities, etc.). These themes then thread through much of what we listen to, watch, and read. This time, at the end of the class, as a way to tie things together, I decided to pull out a lecture I hadn’t given in some time on filesharing, piracy, and the shift in consumer consumption patterns in an age of media consolidation. I didn’t really consider it beyond a well, this will bring the class to a close. But as I started in on the lecture, I felt like a phantasm from the distant, decaying past desperately trying to find a shared language with young people brought up almost exclusively in a world of streaming and binging—everything for them existing in the near-infinity of now. Having to pause to describe something like LimeWire or Napster made sense, but I had to explain just the concept of filesharing or piracy. I felt ripped out of time trying to convince young people that this mattered, this was real, and people argued about this shit constantly. All of it made the late 2000s and 2010s as just one window of disintegrating myth. Talking about these issues sounded as if I was trying to get the students to engage with runes worn smooth by the bone-eroding winds of time.

It was a weird moment.

I considered this classroom breakdown as I contemplated a “year-end list.” As much as I love reading about what friends and colleagues (and a narrowing list of critics and websites) enjoyed over the year, I have had growing ambivalence about sharing what interested me. One part of it is that many websites get hamstrung by mentioning big albums that were the pop oxygen and much smaller records, and it all sort of melts into a slurry of ambiguities. In addition, I still listen to a lot of music released now, but I also (especially this year) tend to fall into holes of listening, where I might like a new record for a spin or two and like or even love it, but then find myself listening to a Ramsey Lewis record every day for two weeks. None of this is particularly weird or noteworthy, except that it happened a lot this year. As I read these lists, I am reminded of how much I remember I liked but just never really returned to—and yet I watched this live clip of “Freight Train” by Nancy Whiskey and the Chas McDevitt Skiffle Group from 1957 about a thousand times because the Alamo Drafthouse played it before a screening of Asteroid City. As much as I liked the new Lana Del Ray, I would imagine that the “Freight Train” clip defined more of my year.

With that as a preface and a caveat, here are some music-related moments that shaped my 2023.

1.    The National: “Eucalyptus”

Ah! Spotify Wrapped! Ah! Humanity! In this case, the data mining underlined what never needed to be emphasized: the song I listened to most. As much as I like the National—and am demographically engineered to serve as their archetypal fan—I had not paid that much attention to their last couple of records. No hand-wringing, no substack post, just good old-fashioned “ok, fine.” But I loved the two singles the band rolled out last Spring. And then…“Eucalyptus.” That’s what brought me back. Splitting everything up post-breakup, the bottled waters, the Afghan Whigs albums, all of it was just so visceral and real. The song has its edge, but the recorded version (based on a soundcheck) keeps everything mostly together. Live, however, is a different story. I saw the band twice this year (Washington, D.C., in May; Houston, in November), and both times, “Eucalyptus” obliterates whatever measured tone in the released version. Interestingly, the band keeps the song very early in their setlist this tour (almost always the second cut), but it has this fury each time. This is especially true with Matt laying into the You should take it, 'cause I'm not going to take it /You should take it, if I miss it, I'll visit section. Heavy and vulnerable and broken and cathartic. And then two more hours of it.

You should take it ‘cause I’m not going to take it

2.    Big Thief: February 16th (Houston)

The first great concert of the year (and I had just seen Bruce Springsteen two nights earlier) was a stunning set by Big Thief. Whereas Springsteen brought the professional stadium charm of a road-hardened magician, Big Thief offered a wildly unhinged tightrope act of communal listening and invention. It stands as one of the most touching and poignant concert moments as a sold-out room turned the power and emotion of a rock and roll stadium show inside out. I have never seen a band play an unreleased song, “Vampire Empire” (released as a single months later), to such an awed and rapturous response. The entire evening was a masterclass in band interactions and inter-dynamics woven through with audience response and catharsis. It was like watching The Last Waltz in real time but with Adrianne Lenker at the center.

When I say infinity, I mean now

3.    Bonnie Prince Billy / Myriam Gendron: September 7th, 8th, and 9^th (Galveston/Houston)

Across three nights in September, I saw Myriam Gendron open for Bonnie Prince Billy as they toured across Texas. Billy was touring behind a fine new album, but I was most excited to see Gendron, who released one of the great folk records a couple of years ago:  Ma Délire. Songs of Love, Lost and Found. These concerts were so intimate and small and vulnerable that it almost felt like too much, too heavy. But it was all so beautiful, too, with Will Oldham at his most charming matched with Gendron’s songs of grief and longing. For the first show, Oldham played a battered borrowed guitar that could only briefly stay in tune (the airline had momentarily waylaid his normal one), and it served as a focal point throughout the evening, often in exasperated comedy, but also this touching tension as he fought openly to wrangle something out of the ordeal. The whole series of shows felt electric, inimitable, authentic.

Knowing is the first step to unknowing

4.    The Grateful Dead: 3/14/1981 (Hartford, CT)

I spent much of July walking throughout Seattle listening to a clutch of less familiar (to me) Grateful Dead shows. I had recently finished a book project that had shaped too many years of my life, and I was gingerly stepping toward a very different type of research still yet to be defined. But on these walks, I happened upon this concert from 1981. I had been tracking down various versions of “Sugaree,” and this one stuns. Jerry rips through this version, and this tour shows off the power of “Tiger,” Garcia’s main guitar during this period. Part mercury, part morphine, it’s a honey-growl sound that seeps into your bones. The band offers forever versions of “Althea” (it is 1981, after all) and “Peggy-O,” but then caps it with a revelatory “Stella Blue.”  Few things on this wounded and wounding planet are as cosmically weighted as a dialed-in Garcia singing a late-set “Jerry Ballad.” The summer as an excursion into the unknown.  

In the end there’s just a song

5.    Jaimie Branch: “The Mountain”

At the end of a bruised summer, we lost Strauss, the cat who will be forever missed. His death capped off three months of turmoil and change. It has been four months, and I still feel his presence every day. Near his end, Fly or Die Fly or Die Fly or Die ((world war)), the posthumous record of trumpeter jaimie branch was released. branch—who had died painfully young in August of 2022—had mostly finished this stunning blast of a record, which was then completed after her death. Near the middle of the record sits “The Mountain,” an astonishing cover of “Comin’ Down” by the Meat Puppets, but really something utterly new. Centered on Jason Ajemian’s double bass, the song is a droning meditation on the climb, however defined. Singing harmony throughout, branch’s horn materializes with a gorgeous muted solo. Ambiguities abound: the song is both about enlightenment and somehow about giving up on the search while searching ad infinitum. And/or drugs. There is also the fact that branch is decentered on her own record, but at the same time, her voice ultimately carries all of the weight and the power. Her vocals in the final verse following her solo are some of the most life-affirming sounds in recent memory. A record shaped and shadowed by death—branch’s, Strauss’s—eventually metamorphizes into something wholly untethered from anything so predictable as the expected patterns of life. Spectral.

I will go again someday

So, my year in music. “Eucalyptus” on one side of a bent coin, “The Mountain” on the reverse. Maybe I will finally figure out my relationship with music this coming year. Still, I am becoming increasingly convinced that the search is the search, that far from a distraction, this sea drift of discovery and engagement is the whole point.  

You should take it, you should take it

Robert Frank, “US 285, New Mexico” (1955)

‘T is my vocation, Hal; ‘t is no sin for a man to labour in his vocation.

—Falstaff, Henry IV, Part 1

Few things thrill me more than quick trips that combine music, art, and research, all pressed into a one- or two-day blur of travel. Recently, I checked in for the return flight as I deplaned. The best. Up there with catching the odd musical on TCM, an uncommonly good Americano—so many places tend to mess up the water part, and cold slate-gray days. Last week, another trek cohered as I flew to NYC to attend a Jeff Tweedy book event (more on that soon enough), tip-toe into research on an expansively vague new project (more on that soon enough), and catch Bob Dylan. Along the way: Harry Smith at the Whitney, a bar seat at the recently re-done Superiority Burger, and one of my new favorite random conversations with strangers. 

As it began to cohere, a significant piece of the trip concerned the Manet/Degas show currently at The Met. A ridiculously well-curated show, the juxtaposition of Manet and Degas plays out in a number of interesting ways. The focal point for me, though, was a series of paintings showcasing how the lives of these two French artists intersected with the American Civil War. Édouard Manet’s take on the Battle of Cherbourg, where the USS Kearsarge sank the CSS Alabama in June 1864, was of particular interest. I am not lurching toward art history, but one potential future project shares enough echoes with these paintings to at least entertain some random thoughts. 

The Capitol Theater in Port Chester, NY, whose storied history intersects with both Bob Dylan and the Grateful Dead, is a venue I long wanted to visit. Opened as a vaudeville/movie theater in 1926, the Cap has served various functions across the decades. The Grateful Dead famously played a slate of shows there in the early 1970s, and the venue has long been the setting for unique and historic shows. “There’s only two theaters, man,” Jerry Garcia once said in an interview, “that are set up pretty groovy all around for music and for smooth stage changes, good lighting and all that – the Fillmore and The Capitol Theatre. And those are the only two in the whole country.” Scanning the recent tour jag, none of the dates seemed particularly travel-friendly (I live in Texas), but once a quick trip took me to New York, the first night of the Port Chester shows finally came into focus.

Dylan’s setlists on this leg of the Rough and Rowdy Ways tour have adhered to a fixed grouping: all of the recent album—minus “Murder Most Foul”—a half-dozen well-curated career songs, with a potential venue-specific wildcard late in the show between “That Old Black Magic” and “Mother of Muses.” The show was great. The new drummer, Jerry Pentecost, is a brilliant addition. Bob was in fine voice, and his piano playing was both adventurous and grounded in the songs. It dawned on me early on—given the GA setup of the theater—that I had never been closer to Dylan. Just a few steps from the apron, a few inches of stage, a piano, and then…Bob. Also, with the lack of phones, the lighting seemed noticeably brighter.1 I saw him in Louisville back at the beginning of this tour in 2021, and the stage was a slurry of browns and coppers—all shadow and blurred light, not to mention Bob’s penchant then for sitting behind an upright piano. Here, his face unobscured, one could witness the glancing smiles to bandmates, the placing/removing/placing of his hat, and the constant mussing of hair. He was present. He was there. 

As has been the case throughout this tour, the static setlists obscure a variety of differences in playing and arrangements. What looks identical via setlist.fm, for instance, is way more fluid and malleable in the live setting. Each time I have seen him since 2021, a different song has hit me as particularly powerful. That night, “My Own Version of You” just stunned me. About halfway through, I remember thinking, “This is the one.” The recorded version amps up the creepy nature of the lyrics in all of their Mary Shelleyian comic-horror glory. Live, however, it has a different groove as the band comes out of the loping “Black Rider” into one of the great vibe songs of the set. He also changed the line do it with decency and common sense to do it with decency…and what else?...common sense. I haven’t heard him add to this line before, but it hit me at the moment. The guy in front of me even laughed and repeated the line, which got picked up on one of the bootleg recordings.

With the history of the Capitol Theater in mind and Dylan’s recent spate of live Grateful Dead covers, I would be lying if I was not hoping for “Brokedown Palace,” in particular. He could have scrapped everything and played an entire Jerry Garcia-themed set.2 Alas, that was not to be. Still, after “That Old Black Magic,” the anticipation crested as to what would follow. As with the Boston show two nights earlier, the band broke into “Footlights,” a superb Merle Haggard song from his late 1970s record Serving 190 Proof. It does not take much of a lyrical deep dive to see how this song would appeal to Dylan, not to mention the plaintive melody that pairs well with his voice and piano. “I make my living writing songs and singing them,” Haggard writes, “But I’m forty-one years old / And I ain’t got no place to go when it’s over.” There are some heavy truths here, especially as Dylan sings this line at twice the age (!) of the protagonist. A song about mortality and vitality and survival, “Footlights” fits so perfectly into the mood and spirit of these shows, it is amazing that he’s only played it twice. “So I’ll hide my age and make the stage / And try to kick the footlights out again.” Heavy.

The context of this show only deepened the meaning for me. Not just being on the road in a flurry of travel but also in a space of openness to conversation and connection to others. Before the show, an older man turned unexpectedly to me and asked, “Does Bob ever show up in your dreams?” Wow. My new go-to small talk question has been formulated. I said no, but he obviously had many experiences with Bob in the Dreamworld. Most of them involved conversations about faith and religion. He said he was unfamiliar with the new record but had centered much of his life on the reverberations of Dylan’s three gospel records from forty years ago. Later, he was audibly ecstatic to hear “Gotta Serve Somebody” and, especially, “Every Grain of Sand.” There was also the woman in long pigtails from Poland, who spoke of her twin sister back in Europe. There was also the lawyer from Marin County, who had moved to an area near Port Chester. I love these transitory moments. Names may be muttered in a quick goodbye, but just hearing of people’s experiences and how they navigate their world is the real delight. 

It was the conversations after the show, however, that sparked my desire to write this essay (and begin the long-belated venture into the territory of under-read Substacks). Waiting for the 10:13 back to the city, I started talking with two people in their twenties. One was writing their dissertation on Shakespeare; the other had deep roots in theater but was currently in business school. It was one of the great random conversations of a traveling life. We talked about Shakespeare, their favorite plays (a very quick and enthusiastic Henry IV, Part One—the second part is garbage—from one, a slightly embarrassed King Lear—I mean, it really is just the best—from the other. We talked about dissertations, academia, careers, and, well outside my wheelhouse, opera. Shakespeare takes us directly back to “My Own Version of You,” with its glancing references to Richard III, Hamlet, and, why not, Julius Caesar. In the quote that opens this essay, Falstaff strikes at the underlying theme of this current late period of Dylan’s performing career. The labor is the vocation, I suppose. But Falstaff is also referencing his own thieving (Henry: from praying to purse-taking), which adds comedy to the exchange and connects nicely to the playful nature of Dylan’s use of Shakespeare as well. 

It is all a flat circle. 

A day that began with Manet/Degas would end at midnight on a train talking about Puccini with strangers. We said our goodbyes as they got off at 125th St., no names exchanged, of course, and I sat back, marveling at how life can work. A few hours later, I was back on the plane thinking, well, maybe I have an entry point, finally, to this Substack.