My first time seeing Rush was in 1984 in Salt Lake City when I was 12. I’d learned about Rush two years earlier from MTV, who constantly played live videos of songs from their 1981 breakthrough album Moving Pictures. Here’s what I wrote about the show earlier this year when I chronicled My 100 Best Shows of All Time:

I had food poisoning but refused to stay home. Lots of moms like mine with their air-drumming kids next to them.

What I left out is that I was so moved by Neil Peart’s drumming that it made me want to stop playing drums. I would never be as good as he was… so why even try? Thankfully that feeling didn’t last long, and soon I was spending every penny I earned on drum gear.

Rush remained one of my favorite bands, but I stopped paying attention to their new music, and I didn't see them live again until 2012—28 years later, which felt nostalgic. I loved watching them plow through songs that returned to me like muscle memory, alongside rows of air-drumming adults like me in the audience.

A few years later, on a whim, I watched the documentary Rush: Beyond the Lighted Stage. Like any good rock doc, it’s more about the people than the music, and I was pulled in by Alex Lifeson’s story—the son of Serbian immigrants from Yugoslavia—and Geddy Lee’s Holocaust-surviving ancestors, who he wrote about extensively in his memoir, My Effin’ Life.

Then in 2020, Neil Peart died, and I thought a lot about how he’d been both a drumming deterrent and an inspiration on the same night when I was a kid. Every drummer in the world was sad that day. Rush would never play again, and I was lucky to have seen them live twice.

So when Rush announced a new drummer and a new tour earlier this year, I thought about my four-decade journey with the band and headed uptown to Madison Square Garden. The band sounded amazing and opened with one of my favorite songs, “Xanadu,” but the show was less about the music than the goofy, human moments the band shared throughout the set. Alex and Geddy smiled at Anika (who wasn’t yet born when “Tom Sawyer” was released) in a way I don’t recall them smiling at Neil, and they acknowledged the audience constantly, encouraging us to air-play whatever instrument we wanted.

That night I watched the musicians on stage like an envious 12-year-old, I studied the production like a cynical 40-year-old, and I connected with Alex and Geddy like a 54-year-old with the new context of their history and the continued history of the band.

Jeff Tweedy wrote a great post about seeing this Rush tour in Chicago (and he also covered “Tom Sawyer”). Unlike Jeff, I loved Rush during my teen years when they weren’t a cool band to be into, and I never abandoned them—I just moved on. This time, watching Rush at MSG, I felt invested in the lives of the people on stage, who seemed grateful to be there and overflowing with joy to be in front of an audience again.

PS you can make all the jokes you want but there was actually a line outside the women’s room.

We’ve gone back and done full video for some Identified season 1 episodes. You can now revisit the guitar playing brothers Hermanos Gutierrez and more in full YouTube glory. Recent Season 3 guests include Brendan Yates of Turnstile and Matt Berninger of The National. It’s all on YouTube and all podcast platforms.

My memoir is called My Life in the Sunshine. You can order it here, or listen to the audiobook on Spotify. Upcoming events are always listed HERE.

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There’s a little-known holiday that’s only celebrated in Utah called Pioneer Day. The July 24th holiday commemorates the arrival of Brigham Young and the first members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS, or Mormons) into the Salt Lake Valley in 1847.

My mother and I moved from New York City to Salt Lake City on July 6, 1982, when I was ten years old. Salt Lake felt further away before the internet. I didn’t know what music to listen to or what clothes to wear—but it didn’t really matter. I hadn’t started school yet, so there weren’t any kids to impress. So imagine me: a ten-year-old with an Afro, fresh off the plane from New York City, standing on Salt Lake City’s State Street watching float after float crawl past at my first-ever Days of ’47 Parade. And awaiting, yes, my first rodeo.

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We had just missed the July 4th holiday, but luckily Pioneer Day comes with its own fireworks spectacle—one that rivals the Fourth. Back then, fireworks were only legal for 12 days each year: the three days before and after July 4th, and the three before and after Pioneer Day.

There was nothing to do that summer, so I spent most of my time with my drum set, a brand-new, shiny midnight blue kit shipped from Sam Ash in NYC that was essentially the bribe that got me to move 2,369 miles. I played whenever I wanted. Neither my mother nor I worried about our neighbors in our apartment building. Surprisingly, they didn’t seem to care, except for one, a drummer himself, who remains a good friend to this day.

We drove to massive supermarkets that felt like food museums, with unbelievably wide aisles built to serve families with five kids. In Salt Lake, the air was so clean I noticed it constantly. I never smelled garbage. It was hot that summer, but a dry, golden kind of hot. Not muggy and disgusting like New York. The pizza, although made from the same ingredients, tasted bland, like a different food entirely. But the Mexican food was twice as good (and still is). Everything felt slow: the walking, the driving, stores and restaurants closing early. Most were closed on Sundays. The movie theaters were gigantic.

When we first heard about Pioneer Day, I remember imagining what it might’ve been like for those 1847 pioneers. Traveling for months across a dangerous country, many dying along the way, and finally arriving in this quiet, empty valley and building a city from scratch.

More than 40 years later, Pioneer Day still lives on my calendar as a quiet reminder to text a few high school friends, dig up some old photos, and remember how unexpectedly welcoming Salt Lake City felt that first summer.

Season 3 of my podcast, Identified is live now. This week’s guest is Daymé Arocena, and recnet guests include Brendan Yates of Turnstile and Matt Berninger of The National. It’s all on YouTube and all podcast platforms.

My memoir is called My Life in the Sunshine. You can order it here, or listen to the audiobook on Spotify. Upcoming events are always listed HERE.

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After releasing their fourth album …And Justice for All on September 7, 1988, Metallica played 222 shows in just over one year, between September 11, 1988 and October 9, 1989. That’s 222 shows in 393 days—a tour that was long enough to span high school and college for me, and a tour during which Metallica went from being one of the biggest underground bands in the world to one of the biggest bands in the world, with a Grammy nomination (famously losing the Best Hard Rock/Metal Performance award to Jethro Tull) and their video for “One” in heavy rotation on MTV.

My first Metallica show was the 61st show of their Damaged Justice tour on December 16, 1988. I usually felt trepidatious at punk and metal shows in Salt Lake City. I stood out in my polo shirt, and even if I traded it out for a band T-shirt, I couldn’t hide that I was one of the only non-white kids in the crowd, whether it was 100 or 10,000. So imagine the sudden burst of confidence I felt alongside the crew of 8 or so preppy-ish high school athletes who attended the Metallica show as my crew. We didn’t have a ton in common other than this band, but that was enough for that night. I’ll never forget the fear in my stomach when the lights went down in the giant Salt Palace arena and the swirling, backwards guitar intro to “Blackened”—obviously from the album, not live—began to play. The next 2 hours were my friends and I smiling, head-banging, and shouting along, “Die… Die… Die…” in the extended part of “Creeping Death” that we all wished would go on forever.

My second Metallica show was the 176th on their tour on July 23, 1989 at Long Island’s Nassau Coliseum. I was spending some of the summer between high school and college at my uncle Alan’s place in New York City, and I convinced him that we needed to head out to the suburbs to get a real taste of what a Metallica crowd was like. Salt Lake City was one thing—still a sheltered, small town. Long Island was real. And the fear came back. Even though Alan was a black belt in Aikido, I felt pretty vulnerable as we walked through the thousands of parking-lot partiers who made up a scene that looked a lot like the pre-show brilliance captured in Heavy Metal Parking Lot. The show—which was pretty much the same one I’d seen in Salt Lake—still gave me the same great feeling of fear and excitement when the lights went down and the guitars began to sing. But now I was an insider. I’d seen the movie and I knew what happened, from the order of the songs to the giant replica of the album cover that eventually toppled to the floor.

My third Metallica show was the 197th on their tour on August 29, 1989 at the Seattle Arena. I’d just moved to Tacoma, WA for college, where my two dormmates were equally as obsessed with music as I was. One of them, Luke, was from Eureka, CA, and he’d seen Metallica at the Cow Palace in San Francisco, a concert that he described as pure mayhem. So when we noticed the Seattle date, we assembled a small crew of people who’d only known one another for a few days, and stuffed into someone’s car, headed 45 minutes north to Seattle. Now I really felt like I’d seen the movie, but the swirling guitar intro was no less exciting the third time, and I was a little less scared with new friends with whom I had something to bond over before our college classes even began.

A pro-shot video of that show was released a while back

It’s kind of incredible to imagine the physical and emotional journey that the band was on for those 222 shows. And it’s pretty fascinating to scroll through the never-ending itinerary HERE.

Season 3 of my podcast, Identified is live now. This week’s guest is Florence Shaw of Dry Cleaning, and last week’s was Brendan Yates of Turnstile. It’s all on YouTube and all podcast platforms.

My memoir is called My Life in the Sunshine. You can order it here, or listen to the audiobook on Spotify. Upcoming events are always listed HERE.

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I have one record shelf in our Brooklyn apartment. It’s big, but it’s not stuffed. I’ve always estimated that it’s around 800 records, definitely less than 1,000. I like to keep it that way—when it starts to feel or look too full, it’s time to purge. Once each year or so, I’ll do a quick glance through and pull out anything that seems unnecessary. A new release I bought on a whim at a show but have never played, or a work album that I really like but likely won’t play on the home turntable.

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This year, I decided to be more diligent, logging every record into Discogs, and only keeping those that I really wanted to keep. The big upside was that some records surprised me with their Discogs value, making them easier to part with. It was a fun exercise to touch every record I own. Some go back to college or my first record store job in Seattle in the mid-90s. Some were incredible dollar bin finds while on tour in the early 2000s, when that was still possible. And some were just normal-ass records that had me questioning how they ever ended up on the shelf. I got rid of about 200, some for exponentially more than I paid, others for free to someone who cares more than I do. Some records reminded me exactly where I was when I bought them and with whom. Others were more of a mystery. By the end of the months-long, very on-and-off, gradual process, I learned a lot about what matters to me in a record. Here are my 3 big takeaways:

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Condition doesn’t really matter

I worked in record stores from 1994-2008, and every time a customer returned a record that I wanted—because it was scratched, warped, or otherwise unsellable, I took it home. Those records all play perfectly. Records were meant to be played! They were meant to be beat up a bit. There’s something about the worn records in my collection that have more character than the perfect, flat ones.

I don’t always need every release by my favorite artist*

The Knife’s Silent Shout and Deep Cuts are 2 of my favorite albums of all time. So naturally I also had the self-titled debut, and the later album, and a bunch of 12” singles with remixes. I don’t listen to those albums, ever, I listen to the 2 that I love. It felt liberating to let the others go, to know that they’ll hopefully end up with someone who plays them, while thinning out my shelf.

*Sometimes I do need every release by my favorite artist

I have several copies of Pixies Doolittle and Nirvana Nevermind. None are hot-shot first pressings or anything like that, and some are beat to shit—like the Italian pressing of Doolittle that looks like someone used the jacket to hold their ash tray and wine glass. There’s something gratifying about finding a record in the wild, even if I already own it, and learning that there’s something different about it. It means that my “N” and “P” sections are a bit fatter than they need to be, but it makes me happy.

My shelf is back down to a manageable size, and it looks better than it has in years. I keep telling myself this will make next year’s purge faster. It won’t. I’ll buy 40 more records I don’t need, fall in love with two of them, and be back here in twelve months, touching everything I own all over again.

Season 3 of my podcast, Identified is live now. This week’s guest is Grammy-winning musician Meshell Ndegeocello, and last week’s was Matt Berninger of The National. It’s all on YouTube and all podcast platforms.

My memoir is called My Life in the Sunshine. You can order it here, or listen to the audiobook on Spotify. Upcoming events are always listed HERE.

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INXS led the pack of Australian MTV bands. Their video for “Don’t Change” was on constantly, and I loved the simplicity of watching the band have an amazing time performing the song. There was Midnight Oil, whose singer Peter Garrett jerked like a zombie robot in “Power and the Passion.” Men At Work felt the most mainstream—the only Australian band that I also heard on the radio, and the only one to sell out the 12,000-capacity Salt Palace in the spring of 1983. Soon they’d fade away, Midnight Oil would get pretty big, and INXS would eclipse them all. But there was one Australian MTV band who never seemed to earn the respect they deserved: Divinyls.

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When my MTV bands were clearly on one side or the other of the rock (Judas Priest, Motley Crue) vs. new wave (Duran Duran, Human League) argument, Divinyls straddled the line between the two. They had new wave haircuts, but “Boys In Town” was a heavy, driving song with a loud guitar solo like the rock songs I liked. The band had 2 guitarists and nobody played a synth or a sax.

“Boys In Town” was on MTV all the time and I was fascinated with its subtle, dark creepiness, mostly due to the band’s singer, Chrissy Amphlett, who holds a light saber microphone stand. You never really see her eyes, even when she screams into the guitar solo. There’s a pulsing urgency to the track, which is a mere 2:44 long. And at the end of the song, after Amphlett desperately sings “Get me out of here” over and over, she takes a breath that you don’t hear on the album but that I felt every time I saw the video. The video captured the perfect storm of directness and mystery: I could see the members of Divinyls—how they looked and what instrument they played—but those cursory bits of information did nothing to tell me who Chrissy Amphlett was. The singer was captivating with a powerful, raspy voice, and her performance actually scared me, an emotion that to this day is my favorite in music. “Boys In Town” is also still a killer song.

Divinyls went on to release What A Life in 1985, which, thanks to Salt Lake City having an alternative radio station by then, felt like a hit to me with “In My Life” and “Pleasure and Pain.” 1988’s Temperamental didn’t have a hit, but I was lucky enough to see that tour with my uncle Alan at The Ritz in NYC that summer, and his loving the show confirmed that Divinyls was a real band, not some MTV schlock.

Then finally, when I was in college in 1990, Divinyls had a proper hit with “I Touch Myself” from their fourth album. It wasn’t easy to be an 18-year-old music enthusiast and have a band that you’ve loved for 7 years suddenly be new and known to everyone—to hear them playing on the radio and hear my classmates singing their song. “I Touch Myself” is catchy, but when it made Divinyls everyone’s band, I tuned out. They only released one more album in 1996 and later disbanded, relegated by many to one-hit-wonder status. But I will always consider Divinyls a 4-hit wonder band, with “Boys In Town” at the top of that list.

I recently did a Divinyls deep dive, and I learned that Amphlett sadly died in 2013. If you’re not satisfied by the regular “Boys In Town” video, HERE is a live clip from the massive US Festival in 1983, and THIS CLIP of the band walking like rock stars straight from the limo to the stage in 1993 is quite rock & roll. But the best live version is THIS ONE from Perkins Palace in Pasadena in 1983.

Season 3 of my podcast, Identified is live now. In this week’s episode, Crying in H Mart author / Japanese Breakfast leader Michelle Zauner explores family, mixed-race identity, and more. It’s on YouTube and all podcast platforms.

My memoir is called My Life in the Sunshine. You can order it here, or listen to the audiobook on Spotify. Upcoming events are always listed HERE.

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Sometimes as a musical overthinker who’s had plenty of time to get too deep into why I love a song, I can’t help but wonder if the repetition is part of what I love. I checked, and by my count, Stevie sings “Don’t You Worry ‘bout a Thing” 30 times in the 4:44 song. That’s a lot. But it doesn’t feel like a lot. It just feels right. We all love repetition in music. We love a hook—whether it’s lyrical, melodic, or rhythmic. Hearing it over and over in a short timespan makes our brains happy. We love to know what’s coming, and we love to share those moments with others who also know. There’s a great 2016 piece in The Guardian about why we love repetition in music.

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Recently I’ve noticed a specific, more unorthodox version of musical repetition that strikes me, and it’s only in a handful of rock songs that I can think of. It’s when the real chorus—the payoff, if you will—doesn’t come ‘til the end of the song, and it repeats. So unlike a traditional song that returns to a chorus multiple times, these wait until the end, and they just keep going.

“Turn It On Again” by Genesis is one of these songs. It’s from their 1980 album Duke, right around the time they were shedding their prog skin and prepping to be an MTV band. The chorus doesn’t kick in until 2:56, then it just repeats for nearly a minute as the song fades out. I was never a big Genesis fan, but this song always got me when the live video came on MTV, and clearly it stuck with me.

Journey did it in 1979 with their slinky power ballad, “Lovin’ Touchin’ Squeezin,” half of which is dedicated to a layered sing-along of “na na na na na na…” They did it again in 1981 with “The Party’s Over (Hopelessly In Love)” which ends with a minute-long chorus. Maybe that’s what allowed Journey to nail the form later that year with “Don’t Stop Believin’.” Who would have guessed that one of the biggest songs of all time would make you wait through 3:32 (and a guitar solo that teases the melody!) to get to the chorus?

I loved the movie Hair when I was a kid, largely because of its soundtrack. Then I forgot about it for decades, until I saw Summer of Soul in 2021, which featured The 5th Dimension performing “Aquarius / Let The Sunshine In,” which were both important songs in Hair. Their version is a medley of two different songs, and when “Sunshine” comes in, it’s only the chorus. Over and over and over for well over two minutes.

And the full version of the song from Hair does the same thing, extending for two minutes after a nearly-four-minute build up. These harmonies get me choked up the same way today as they did when I was seven, and I’m not sure if it’s nostalgia, or that they’re just great harmonies, or if it’s the compounding effect of hearing them over and over and over again.

I can think of several examples from my alt/rock world: Jane’s Addiction’s “Summertime Rolls” (except the return to a verse). Rocket From The Crypt—for over 6 minutes—in “Glazed.” Rage Against The Machine’s Zach de la Rocha insisting, “Fuck you I won’t do what you tell me” 16 times at the end of “Killing In The Name” feels like it counts. Shudder To Think’s “X-French Tee Shirt” hits the chorus at 1:36 and it doesn’t stop until the song ends nearly 3 minutes later. It’s one of my favorite songs, and the one I was most surprised to hear on the radio and see on MTV when it was released in 1994. Foo Fighters came close on 1997’s “New Way Home” (but they snuck in an early chorus). And in 2003, Death Cab For Cutie’s “Transatlanticism” built for a glorious 5 minutes before ending.

What is it about this formula that gets me? Is it the elongated musical tension? Did these songs grab me the first time? Or did it only happen once I subconsciously recognized the pattern—when my brain knew that a gigantic payoff was coming? I’m shocked that I can only think of a handful of songs like this. There must be more. Please comment or reply.

Fellow music dorks: don’t @ me with some bullshit about other morsels of the song being the chorus and these are delayed bridges or outtros. You know what I’m getting at here.

Season 3 of my podcast, Identified is live now. The first episode is with Julian Pratt—a true New Yorker—from the band Show Me The Body. It’s on YouTube and all podcast platforms.

My memoir is called My Life in the Sunshine. You can order it here, or listen to the audiobook on Spotify. Upcoming events are always listed HERE.

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Roy Ayers Ubiquity’s album and song Everybody Loves the Sunshine turned 50 last week, and as the anniversary approached, I wanted to honor the music and take a step back from writing about my father as a person. “Everybody Loves the Sunshine” is a hugely popular song, but it’s never fully received the accolades it deserves. Part of what pushed me to write was fear: if I didn’t make the case for this song’s importance, it’s possible nobody else would.

So I started writing, then I started calling people. Questlove was an amazing interview, talking about the song in colors more than sounds. Chi’cas Reid and Philip Woo—who performed the iconic vocals and keyboard parts on the 1976 album—gave enlightening insight to the making of the song. edited the piece and pushed me somewhere I couldn't have gotten on my own. I put a lot of energy into it, and I’m thrilled to have it out in the world.

You can read it HERE.

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I was lucky to not only write about the anniversary for the Los Angeles Times, but to talk about it on KCRW’s Morning Becomes Eclectic with the host (and Sly Stone’s daughter) Novena Carmel. Everybody Loves the Sunshine was started in Los Angeles—where Roy was born in 1940—and finished in New York City, where he died in 2025. The song has always held a bit of both cities to me, and it felt right to publish and discuss it in LA. In the sunshine.

Nabil

I’ve shared some clips from Season 3 of my podcast, Identified, which will return in June. In the meantime, you can catch up on the first 40-ish episodes on YouTube and all podcast platforms.

My memoir is called My Life in the Sunshine. You can order it here, or listen to the audiobook on Spotify. Upcoming events are always listed HERE.

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So we decided to reissue the album in 2018, remastering from an original LP. Getting to write a piece for The New York Times about the album—and about my time as a child in Alan’s decrepit Canal Street loft—turned out to be the thing that jump-started my memoir. So not only do I have Alan to thank for buying me drums when I was two-and-a-half years old, but also for getting me into writing.

Valley of Search garnered far more attention than we could have hoped for, and after a sold-out show in Brooklyn, Alan started writing more music. In 2020, 45 years after his debut, we released The Fire Still Burns, followed by Infinite Love Infinite Tears four years later, and now, just two years after that, Alan’s new album: Anthem for Peace.

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Alan is the person who got me into music, and who allowed me to get myself into writing. And honestly, I just have a really great time making things with my uncle. There’s also something grounding and fun about being the president of a large record label group, and also having a hobby where I do more of the day-to-day work myself—commissioning the artwork and videos, paying the invoices for the LPs and CDs, packing every mail order to destinations as close as New Jersey and as far as Hong Kong. That’s a huge part of the fun: a song in Alan’s head showing up fully formed at someone’s doorstep, or on their phone, six months later.

If you want the longer story, The New Yorker went deep on it in 2024—and there’s more you can hear on NPR and read elsewhere.

But the best way in is through the music. All of Alan’s music is available on all streaming platforms, and on vinyl and CD from Bandcamp or your local independent record store. Or this YouTube playlist.

New Yorkers: Alan will perform at Vision Festival on June 27 as part of a lineup that includes William Parker and William Hooker.

Speaking of family and music, I have a piece running in The Los Angeles Times next week celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Roy Ayers Ubiquity album and song Everybody Loves the Sunshine.

My podcast, Identified is on break until we jump into Season 3. In the meantime, you can catch up on the first 40-ish episodes on YouTube and all podcast platforms.

My memoir is called My Life in the Sunshine. You can order it here, or listen to the audiobook on Spotify. Upcoming events are always listed HERE.

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Identified podcast

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At the time I watched a lot of Sesame Street and The Electric Company—both shows with real people, not animations. I didn’t get into cartoons until later, and I was never into comics. So I’m not sure exactly what hit me so hard when I saw Kiss’ album Destroyer sitting on the UMass Amherst bookstore shelf that day.

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But I remember how it felt: like I had to have it. Like the world might have ended if my mother hadn’t agreed to buy it. I imagined that, like its cover, Destroyer sounded scary, heavy, and dark. My musical vocabulary was pretty limited at the time, but I’d listened to a ton of music — enough that, looking back, I wonder: if I’d heard the music before seeing the album, would I have still been interested in it? Thankfully the cover grabbed me first.

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I wrote about that day in My Life in the Sunshine:

At home, I played the record over and over. I studied every inch of the record’s colorful jacket, memorizing details like the fan club’s New York City mailing address. I read the tiny text on the record’s circular label, which featured the word Casablanca in neon-like letters — the same label I later saw on my Village People record.

Does this happen now? Can it? It’s so much more likely that our first encounter with music is hearing it—our interest piqued by a familiar voice, an intriguing lyric, or an undeniable riff. That’s probably a callback to a century ago, when recorded music first existed and radio was the primary mode of discovery—when records came package in protective brown paper sleeves. It wasn’t until 1938 that Columbia Records’ 23-year-old art director Alex Steinweiss produced the first album cover art: a photo of a theatre marquee on a Rodgers & Hart album.

By the time I walked that Umass bookstore aisle, record covers had become as important as the music itself—a way to include a photo of the artist, or some other image that represented the music. Something that might grab a kid’s attention on a record store shelf.

In the case of Destroyer, the cover was by fantasy artist Ken Kelly, and it was a bit of a left turn for a band that had already produced three strong studio album covers. But the Destroyer art added something more—and with the album turning 50 this year, I’ve been thinking about why it still holds such a grip on me.

It’s the first Kiss album cover that feels like it means something beyond the band’s image: it conveys what I now know about that time in their history. Their first three albums didn’t do well, their label was about to go under, and Alive! was a last-gasp effort—a live album that somehow became a hit and changed the band’s trajectory. Destroyer was their first album as a successful band, and everything about the cover conveys that—from the fake muscles, to Gene’s fuck-you grin, to the band posed as super heroes standing on top of the world.

And of course there’s the music, which now stands out as more grandiose than the band’s first three straight-ahead rock albums. Strings, choirs, and the Peter Criss-sung piano ballad frame Destroyer as a giant leap for the band. But at its core it still has the best rock songs—from the opening swing of “Detroit Rock City“ to the pre-grunge dirge of “God of Thunder“ to the power-pop shine of “Shout It Out Loud.” Everyone gets a chance on the mic except guitarist Ace Frehley, who was supposedly going through a hard time and missed some of the recording sessions (and who arguably made the only great Kiss solo album two years later).

But I’m convinced that, had I not seen Destroyer on that shelf when I was five, it may never have hit me the way it did. The music delivered on every promise the cover made—and despite how non-threatening and sometimes just plain funny I find it all now, I still get a chill every time I see that cover.

On May 15, I’ll release Anthem for Peace, the new album by my uncle Alan Braufman. We recorded it in November 2025 with an all-star band in Brooklyn, and released this live video for “In Motion.”

My podcast, Identified is on break until we jump into Season 3. In the meantime, you can catch up on the first 40-ish episodes on YouTube and all podcast platforms.

My memoir is called My Life in the Sunshine. You can order it here, or listen to the audiobook on Spotify. Upcoming events are always listed HERE.

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In November 1987, I was a 15-year-old, music-obsessed kid living with my white mother in Salt Lake City, a place that often felt far from everything that mattered. My Black father was out of the picture, and I was still figuring out who I was. I went to a lot of shows, but they were mostly white bands playing for white crowds, and I never felt like I quite belonged.

That Thanksgiving, while visiting family friends in Houston, I saw an ad for Fishbone performing at Fitzgerald’s. The band’s debut EP hadn’t fully grabbed me, but something about the image—an all-Black band I’d likely never see in Utah—felt urgent. That night, as the band tore through their set, flying across the stage but never missing a note, I remember thinking, This is what greatness looks like. Not just wild energy, but clarity and mastery, like they’d been born to do this and nothing else. I also remember the audience, a mix of white, Black, and brown faces forming one cohesive, sweaty mosh pit, and feeling for the first time that there were others out there who understood my love for hard grooves, punk energy, and heavy guitars.

Back home, I scoured every record store I could until I finally found In Your Face on cassette. I made my mom take the long way on our drive home just so I wouldn’t have to stop listening. “When Problems Arise” was instantly recognizable, its heavy bassline dominating the song. “Cholly” was both funnier now that I could understand the lyrics, and also more serious in its hard-hitting delivery. “A Movement In The Light” surprised me—a ballad with patience, an arc, and innate musicality. In Your Face was both a major musical leap from Fishbone’s debut EP and a significant cultural artifact: a blend of ska, rock, funk, and soul that hadn’t existed in this way before—from a Black band on a major label. It was a defiant, joyful rejection of genre boundaries and racial expectations.

Thirty-nine years later, my teenage feelings were finally validated in a Zoom conversation with Angelo Moore, Christopher Dowd, and Kendall Jones, three of the six people who made In Your Face. The band was effervescent, thrilled to see one another and to discuss the album that changed their lives as much as it changed mine.

“Everybody in this band is kind of a musicologist,” Dowd explained. “We’ve always wanted our music to tell the entire diaspora of the Black experience. We were just trying to do that thing that spoke to everyone, regardless of race.”

You could hear right away that Fishbone was a product of their environment—Los Angeles in the ’80s. “Punk, ska, reggae, whatever,” Moore added, summing up their wide-open approach. “Cab Calloway, big orchestrations—just the respect for the history of Black music that was in Fishbone.”

David Kahne, the Columbia Records A&R rep who signed Fishbone and produced In Your Face, recalled how the deal with Columbia came together.

“To sign them, I had to get permission from the Black music department because they were Black,” Kahne said. “The head of Black music said, ‘This sounds like rock.’ I said, ‘Yeah, it is.’ They said, ‘Okay, you can sign it over there on the white side.’”

“We were signed outright to Columbia Records, which was kind of a big deal,” Jones said. “We knew that the underground was where we were going to survive. We knew they didn’t know what the fuck to do with us, but we would take the money and run with it.”

Fishbone quickly fell in with bands like Jane’s Addiction and the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

“They didn’t know what to do with those bands either. We were all birthing a sound. That’s why they called it alternative,” Dowd said. “Nothing against our contemporaries, because they’re all evolved, incredible human beings. But make no mistake, they definitely had the complexion for the protection.”

By the time they entered the studio to record In Your Face, Fishbone had been playing nonstop. Their part-mosh-pit, part-revival-meeting live shows were explosive, and David Kahne’s challenge as the producer was to capture that on tape without losing its spark.

“We rehearsed a lot before recording,” Kahne recalled. “We knew the songs and we did it quick—a few days at a time at Sunset Sound Factory. In and out. The ideas were so good. It was scattered, sure, but the energy was incredible.”

Listening to In Your Face, it’s easy to hear how much the band had grown since their 1985 debut EP. The album was sharper, faster, and more confident. The humor was still there, but it came with a deeper sense of purpose. The songs were bigger, their intent clearer.

“When Problems Arise” kicks the record off like a warning shot: hard, funky, and precise, with Moore’s voice teetering between fury and joy. The band’s interplay is airtight—Jones’s guitar slicing through Dowd’s keys, Walter A. Kibby II’s punching baritone, and Norwood and Fish as the ever-present anchor.

“I Wish I Had a Date” could’ve been a novelty song in another band’s hands, but Fishbone plays it like it’s life or death. “Give It Up” turns romantic frustration into a pogo-ready anthem. And “A Movement In The Light” shows a different side of the band entirely—a patient, slow-building song that trades intensity for vulnerability.

This feeling that the band could do anything is what ties In Your Face together. No genre could contain them, no label could define them. The record’s title itself felt like a dare. In Your Face wasn’t about confrontation so much as confidence. It was a band saying, “This is who we are, and we’re not hiding it.”

When In Your Face landed in November 1986, critics praised its musicianship, but they didn’t know where to file it. Spin called it “an unclassifiable mix of ska, funk, punk, and soul,” while Rolling Stone noted that Fishbone “plays faster and harder than anyone else in their class.” But neither review quite captured how revolutionary it was to see a young, Black band blasting through genres that many in the industry still treated as white territory.

Even with label support, radio stations didn’t know what to do with Fishbone. MTV gave “When Problems Arise”—a surreal mash of color, choreography, and pure Fishbone energy co-directed by Toni Basil—some late-night play, but for the most part, the band’s reputation spread the old-fashioned way, through word of mouth and relentless touring.

By the time I saw them in Houston, In Your Face was one year old and Fishbone had spent the better part of a year on the road, headlining and also opening for the Beastie Boys on their Licensed to Ill tour, winning over audiences one show at a time.

“It’s healthy competition every night,” Moore said. “Fishbone is going to kick everybody’s ass. We love you, but this is what’s gonna happen.”

“Any band that doesn’t have that ain’t really got it,” Jones added.

That confidence was more than bravado. It was survival. Fishbone knew what they were up against. The industry didn’t see bands like them. But onstage, they created their own world, and invited everyone in.

Even with their crossover sound, Fishbone’s experience was still shaped by race, by how they were seen, categorized, and marketed. They were a band that wanted to speak to everyone, but the world didn’t always make that easy.

“I don’t recall hearing any lyrics about being affected by racism from No Doubt, or the Chili Peppers, or Jane’s Addiction,” Moore recalled. “But it came out of us because of our place in society as Black men.”

Take, for example, the lyrics from “In the Air.”

It’s not decisions made in city halls
It’s not amusement parks or shopping malls
No, it’s not the preachers when the tower falls
It’s not manipulated laws
It’s always in the air

This isn’t a protest song in the traditional sense. There’s no finger-pointing, no manifesto. Instead, it’s a quiet acknowledgement of something pervasive: the sense that racism doesn’t live in a single place. It’s environmental. It’s everywhere. It’s always in the air.

Fishbone weren’t trying to make “Black punk” or “Black rock” music. They were trying to make Fishbone music. And in doing so, they built something that transcended every label. In Your Face was full of contradictions, just like America itself.

When I think back to that night in Houston, it wasn’t just the sound or the chaos that struck me, it was the crowd: white kids, Black kids, brown kids, all moving together in the same sweaty mosh pit. For the first time, I felt like I belonged somewhere. I didn’t have the language for it then, but Fishbone had created a space where identity was expansive, not restrictive. A place where difference wasn’t erased, difference was the point. I had no way of knowing it at the time, but I was watching a group at the height of its powers—still hungry, still defiant, and still getting better every night. They weren’t playing for their peers, their critics, or their label. They were playing for everyone in that room.

And that was the revelation: for the first time, I truly felt like I was part of that everyone.

“We need to recognize our shared humanity,” Jones said. “We originated this but it is shared. It is for all of humanity.”

“It’s for everybody,” Moore agreed. “That’s why we live on a planet with gravity and we breathe the same air—because it’s supposed to be shared.”

That night in Houston, I learned that I could feel that sense of belonging in a crowd. But Fishbone already knew. They saw it and they built it every night.

Nabil Ayers — Brooklyn, December 2025

My podcast, Identified is on break until we jump into Season 3. In the meantime, you can catch up on the first 40-ish episodes on YouTube and all podcast platforms.

My memoir is called My Life in the Sunshine. You can order it here, or listen to the audiobook on Spotify.

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What feels most important is holding the record.

In a time when I can listen to any of this music anywhere—for free, on a walk, on the subway, on a flight—I like knowing these objects are at home, representing the music I love.

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I’m only in the F section, and I’ve already triggered hundreds of small memories. Holding my copy of Blood Brothers’ …Burn, Piano Island, Burn, I remembered the huge skip in one song—one of many “defective” returns that became a perk of owning a record store. Enon’s High Society took me back to driving in Seattle, pulling over to call KEXP because I needed to know what song was playing. Foo Fighters’ The Colour and the Shape came from a distributor going-out-of-business sale in the late ’90s, selling everything for a dollar.

More than one record has already given me the deep-pit-in-my-stomach feeling of PTSD, reminding me that, while I love my job, records aren’t always a source of joy.

Cataloging also turns into a strange guessing game. Some records I assumed were worth $5 are suddenly $100; others I thought were rare have dozens of copies for sale for almost nothing. But the price doesn’t change how I feel about any of them. I’m not doing this to sell them—I just want to know what I have. And despite how methodical and time-consuming it is, it’s actually fun.

By now you’ve probably heard about the vinyl resurgence—everyone from longtime collectors to Gen Z consuming the physical artifact. Maybe you’ve also heard that it’s already shifting again, toward CDs or even old iPods. I love the moment the needle drops and my stomach jumps, but I don’t spend much time thinking about analog vs. digital. Honestly, most of the ’90s albums I love still sound best on CD.

For me, vinyl isn’t about sound quality. And it isn’t nostalgia, either. I still buy new records, and I keep a running list on my phone of what I’m hoping to find. I could easily buy most of them online, but that’s not really the point.

The point is knowing they’re here. The physical proof of a moment—when I first heard the band, or bought it from the bass player at the merch table, or when someone sold us a record and I quietly hid it in the office, knowing it would never make it to the record store floor.

My podcast, Identified is on break until we jump into Season 3. In the meantime, you can catch up on the first 40-ish episodes on YouTube and all podcast platforms.

My memoir is called My Life in the Sunshine. You can order it here, or listen to the audiobook on Spotify. I’ve got a few events coming up, including one in Athens, Ohio on April 15. Events are always listed HERE.

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Around that same time, I kept coming back to the number of albums turning 50 this year—albums from 1976. It’s an incredible year for music, and rather than commit to a definitive list, I’m more interested in dropping in occasionally to talk about one album—or a few that share something in common—that I love.

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When I started looking these albums up, trying to confirm they were actually released in 1976, I was struck less by the music in my head and more by the cover art. I was four years old in 1976, already deep into my mother’s and uncle’s record collections, and these covers felt enormous—12x12 squares in the hands of a kid. Twelve years later, at 16, I was full-sized, but the artwork had shrunk into CDs and cassettes in my friends’ cars.

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Held together, these 1976 covers feel like a kind of museum. Do album covers today look like this? Most don’t even include artist or band names, let alone distinctive, recognizable logos. Now they’re optimized for streaming—designed to pop as tiny squares on a phone, not as 12” x 12” pieces of art. The funny thing is, those 1976 covers still work beautifully when they’re small. More than anything, they feel like previews of the music, visual versions of what’s inside.

For this first pass through 1976, I want to focus on five album covers that are simply photographs of the artists themselves:

Thanks to “Dancing Queen,” ABBA’s fourth album, Arrival, was the Swedish band’s international breakthrough. The cover photo is a leap ahead of the band portraits on their previous three albums—modern and sleek, with all four members seated inside a clear, space-age helicopter. Are they taking off? Are they arriving? Either way, it feels intentional.

It’s also the first ABBA album to feature the now-iconic backwards “B” logo, designed by Rune Söderqvist, an advertising executive who began working with the band in 1975. Notably, it’s the first time the group appears on a cover without smiling.

Diana Ross’s self-titled album has always reminded me of a movie poster, right down to the tiny track listing along the bottom. I love that even though it’s a giant close-up of her face, you can’t quite tell if her hair is pulled tightly back or styled into a full Afro—both looks she wore that year. It makes me wonder if that choice was deliberately ambiguous.

Perhaps the most iconic—and definitely the most New York—cover in this post is Ramones’ self-titled debut. Roberta Bailey shot the photo for $125, and as I type, I’m realizing that this album is so raw and minimal that it actually sounds like its in black and white.

It doesn’t get more mid-’70s than the cover of Heart’s Dreamboat Annie. As a longtime Seattleite, I’ve always thought of Heart as a Seattle band. But it turns out they’d been based in Vancouver for a few years when they recorded their debut, originally released on a small Canadian label in 1975 before an international release on February 14, 1976 I love a clever record company move.

And finally, the 1976 cover that feels the most on-the-nose. The Brothers Johnson’s Look Out for #1 sounds exactly like it looks: hard-hitting, groovy, and at times stanky. George Johnson’s ring looks like it’s about to scratch the shit out of that Les Paul. Louis Johnson is in full bass-slapping ecstasy, and every time I look at him, I hear the “Thriller” bass line he’d record six years later. Of all the albums here, this is the only one where the logo and title feel like an afterthought—more like a baseball-themed marketing sticker than a design choice that matches the photo.

What I keep coming back to is how clearly these covers communicate the music. Before you heard a note, you got a sense of what you were about to get. That feels rare now, but maybe that’s why these covers still hold up, whether they’re twelve inches wide or an inch on a screen.

I had a great time last week on The Daily Whatever Show, where my friend and I discussed key moments in 1990s and 2000s Seattle history, from Nirvana shows to the smoking ban.

The Daily Whatever Show

The Daily Whatever Show With Guest Nabil Ayers

Today on TDWS, we sat down with Nabil Ayers — president of Beggars Records, co-founder of Sonic Boom, author of My Life in the Sunshine, podcaster, and proud GenX multi-hyphenate — to dig into his Substack story about his favorite live shows ever…

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5 months ago · 36 likes · 4 comments · The Daily Whatever Show and Dana DuBois

My guest on Identified this week is bestselling author and literary agent Betsy Lerner, who explores identity, family history, and the complicated path to becoming a writer. It’s hard to believe that this is the final episode of Season 2. We’ve already recorded some great episodes for Season 3, which will launch later this year.

My memoir is called My Life in the Sunshine. You can order it here, or listen to the audiobook on Spotify. I’ve got a few events coming up, including one in Athens, Ohio on April 15. Events are always listed HERE.

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A friend recently introduced me to internet Archive, a huge online vault of, among other things, digitized live show recordings from the ’80s, ’90s, and 2000s. Last weekend I spent hours searching for and listening to sometimes poor-quality, and sometimes great, recordings of shows I actually attended by Jane’s Addiction, Descendents, Smashing Pumpkins, and others. It wasn’t nearly as exciting as being there, but it was fun to confirm or contradict my memories about how fast or slow—or how greatly or poorly—the band played.

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Then I got an idea and searched for The Long Winters, the band I played drums in from 2005 to 2008. And sure enough, a dozen live shows live there. I have a lot of recordings from the tours we did back then, but I definitely didn’t have everything. Now I have a lot more, and listening back felt like a version of finding a never-before-seen photo.

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I remember every show, or at least some detail from each one. In Majorca, our Spanish tour manager Carlos joined us on stage to play bongos on one song. In Toronto, our singer John hit his tooth on the microphone and after the show that tooth was completely pulled out by a piece of sushi. Listening to a Seattle show reminded me that we left our gear at the club that night, picked it up the next morning, and then instead of going our separate ways drove to a shooting range in Bellevue, Washington, where I shot a gun for the first (and last) time. Our friend Merlin compared the experience to all-you-can-eat sushi: really great until you get sick of it, then horrific.

What surprised me most about the recordings was hearing the interaction between the four of us on stage. Memory tends to compress bands into songs and tours, but the recordings capture the smaller moments: the banter between songs, John’s introductions, the way we’d stretch or rush parts depending on the night, and the real-time attempts to honor bad cover songs people yelled from the audience. Some shows sound loose and comfortable, others more tentative. But what came through most was how well we got along. We liked each other, and the stage was just an extension of the van, our practice space, or the Waffle House where we’d eaten that morning.

I don’t have any childhood videos, but I wonder if this is what it’s like for people who do. They probably feel incredibly proud of some moments and embarrassed by others. They see their parents, siblings, and others around them and remember different versions of what those relationships felt like at the time. Sometimes they miss them, sometimes they’re glad they’ve moved on.

This is not a post designed to get you to listen to ten hours of Long Winters shows from the late 2000s. But I do recommend you spend some time on the site and find a show or two that you attended—or that you wish you had attended. Try to picture yourself in that smoky, or sweaty, or whatever-it-was club, with the volume blaring and someone important standing next to you.

For me, it’s a reminder of the power of live music: that it’s never been easier to listen to everything, but it’s still magical to go out and experience it with other people—and to know that the people making the music are experiencing something too.

Nest week we’ll bring my podcast Identified to London for a live event with podcaster Adam Buxton and Dry Cleaning vocalist Florence Shaw. It’s already sold out, but we’ll be doing more of these soon.

My memoir is called My Life in the Sunshine. You can order it here, or listen to the audiobook on Spotify. I’ve got a few events coming up, including one in Athens, Ohio on April 15. Events are always listed HERE.

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Order "My Life in the Sunshine"

Watch: CBS Saturday Morning Segment

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In music, they say you have your entire life to write your first album, and six months to write your second. I’m surprised I haven’t heard a version of this in book publishing, where it feels even more true.

While I didn’t actually start writing my memoir at the beginning of my life, the book begins the moment my mother meets my father. And the ending—which changed at the last minute because real life intervened—happened about two years before publication. Let’s call that my whole life.

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I didn’t want to be one of those people who shouted from the rooftops, “I’m writing a book!” and then never finished. So I was very quiet about writing My Life in the Sunshine until the deal was inked and everything was moving. Now it’s been out for more than three years and I’ve had way more than six months to write the next one.

It’s not like I’ve been sitting around doing nothing. I’ve been busy. But books take time—time to engage fully, and time to step completely away before revisiting. And sometimes they take something harder to find: an ending.

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I kept meticulous track of everything that happened as a result of My Life in the Sunshine. Dozens of new connections—a sister, cousins, several of my father’s bandmates from the ’70s who’ve told me stories from the road and the studio. I’ve made two more trips to the rural Mississippi towns where my paternal ancestors lived. Each trip added more detail, more texture, and more questions.

All of this is to say: I’ve written (most of) another book. But it isn’t finished. And I can’t finish it yet. I’ve tried. I’ve outlined endings. I’ve forced conclusions. Every time, it feels dishonest—like I’m wrapping up a story that’s still unfolding. There’s a quiet fear in that. A fear that momentum fades. That people assume you only had one story in you. That if you wait too long, the window closes. Some days it feels like the universe is telling me to move along.

But there’s also something grounding about recognizing when a story isn’t ready. The first book depended on facts finally revealing themselves. This one depends on life continuing to move. I can’t rush that without compromising what made the first book meaningful to me in the first place.

So instead of forcing it, I’ve let it become a living document, something I add to as things happen. Hopefully someday it will be obvious. It will feel complete.

In the meantime, last summer I started thinking about how to combine my love of slightly off-beat ‘90s thrillers like The Player and The Spanish Prisoner with my love of action movies with chases and explosions, and mix that with my years as a drummer touring in a rock band.

After writing a book where I had to wait for the truth to reveal itself, it feels almost radical to make things up. To decide what happens. To build tension on purpose. To create an ending because I can. I’m starting to figure it out. And I have to admit, it’s more fun than playing in a band or writing a memoir. Maybe because it feels a little like both.

Unlike my first book, this one doesn’t require my life to finish unfolding. It just requires me to keep digging in, to keep having fun, and to say out loud in a public place: I’m writing a book.

Now I have to finish. I hope you get to see it someday. The universe is telling me you will.

This Monday eve (Feb 23) we’ll shoot 2 episodes of my Identified podcast live with an audience at the beautiful Public Records space in Brooklyn. My guests will be the musician and current star of Hadestown, Allison Russell, and the musician and author Valerie June. You can buy tickets at the link below.

Tickets to Identified Live

My guest on Identified this week is the musician Damon McMahon, formally Amen Dunes, who reflects on growing up between two very different worlds: his mother’s side of European Jewish Holocaust survival and his father’s working-class Irish American roots.

My memoir is called My Life in the Sunshine. You can order it here, or listen to the audiobook on Spotify. I’ve got a few events coming up, including one in Brooklyn on March 5 where I’ll host Ronen Givony’s launch of his new book Us v. Them: The Age of Indie Music and a Decade in New York (2004-2014). Info HERE. And more events HERE.

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Before you get all huffy and ready for an argument, let me define “best.” In this case, it means my favorite. The most memorable. The show that scared me the most, or made me smile the most, or introduced me to a band I’d later love. It’s not necessarily about technical perfection, emotional transcendence, or even music. It’s about the shows that stuck, for whatever reason.

A few takeaways jumped out immediately: I’ve always loved bands with guitars. I’ve seen very little live hip-hop, country, R&B, or electronic music. I saw a lot of jazz in my first ten years, but I couldn’t tell you who or where. Not surprisingly, my college years ‘89-’93 in Seattle were arguably the best. I didn’t include any bands I work with—which wasn’t easy—so you’ll notice a pretty sharp drop-off after 2009, when I started working at 4AD and was seeing more live music than ever.

I’m already bracing for texts from high school and college friends, and former bandmates about the shows that should obviously be on this list. But if I can’t remember them… should they be?

I never got to see Sly, Abba, Zeppelin, Stevie in his prime, Fugazi, Plasmatics, Fela, Black Flag, Beyoncé, Kraftwerk, Public Enemy, Parliament, early Van Halen, or The Knife on the Silent Shout tour. Maybe that’s another list.

This might come off as a gigantic humble brag. But man, this was a fun way to re-live 100 great nights. So here they are: the 100 best shows I could think of, in the order I saw them.

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The Grateful Dead / Patti Smith / Roy Ayers Ubiquity / Alumni Stadium / Amherst, MA — May 12, 1979. This is the first time I remember seeing Roy Ayers live. I didn’t see Patti, and I could hear The Grateful Dead for hours from our backyard while I played with Legos in the sunshine.

Kiss / Madison Square Garden / NYC — July 25, 1979. My mother and I wore baseball helmets because we heard that everyone would light fireworks, which was true. This full show video is so weird to watch, especially the pre-show stuff, knowing that I was there as a 7-year-old kid. They opened with “King of the Night Time World.”

Simon & Garfunkel / Central Park / NYC — September 19, 1981. My friend Kenny lived in a fancy apartment on Central Park West, and although our parents tried to drag us to the show, Kenny and I stayed home and watched an REO Speedwagon live concert tape on their brand new VCR. We could hear S&G from outside, so it counts.

Pat Benatar + Billy Squier / 84th St. Pier / NYC — August 9, 1981. My mom and I didn’t have tickets so we listened from outside. It was the same day as the all-star game and I remember calling my uncle Alan from a phone booth and him trying to get me to come home and watch the game. Music won, though.

Journey / Salt Palace / Salt Lake City, UT — May 29, 1982. My mom and I visited SLC to consider moving there from NYC. Journey played across the street from our hotel. Escape tour. All the hits. Then we moved there. They opened with “Escape.”

The Police / Salt Palace / Salt Lake City, UT — August 2, 1982. This show felt cool and exotic, and I couldn’t take my eyes off Stewart Copeland. The arena was pretty empty. Opened with “Message in a Bottle.”

Psychedelic Furs + Our Daughter’s Wedding / Perkins Palace / Pasadena, CA — April 1, 1983. My uncle Alan had toured in the Furs and was now playing sax w/ the opener, ODW. I hung out backstage and met everyone. It was like the Furs stepped right out of MTV.

Bow Wow Wow / University of Utah / Salt Lake City, UT — May 22, 1983. My mother and I got there early enough to hear the band sound check and we were too nervous to say hello when they walked by after. Annabella was 16. Incredible show by an underrated band. Opened with “Baby Oh No.”

ZZ Top + Quiet Riot / Salt Palace / Salt Lake City, UT — June 19, 1983. The first concert I went to alone with friends. Scary crowd for me and my 11-year-old pals. MTV era now in full effect.

Def Leppard / Salt Palace / Salt Lake City, UT — August 7, 1983. My mom and I hung by the stage door and met the drummer, Rick Allen, who was 19 and incredibly friendly. My first time meeting someone whose specific job I wanted and it terrified me. Opened with “Rock! Rock! (Till You Drop).”

Rush / Salt Palace / Salt Lake City, UT — May 14, 1984. I had food poisoning but refused to stay home. Lots of moms like mine with their air-drumming kids next to them.

Berlin + Talk Talk / Salt Palace Convention Center / Salt Lake City, UT — July 9, 1984. My mom called the Marriott Hotel where all the bands stayed and asked for the manager, whose name was on the album jacket. Berlin’s singer, Terri Nunn, answered the phone. I listened in—she sounded like we’d woken her from a nap, but she agreed to the backstage passes that my mom asked for. My friend Benjy had just had mouth surgery so we looked like 2 weird, shy kids in the corner, especially Benjy, who was on painkillers and had a bruised up face. The guys in the band were super nice and gregarious, but Terri never appeared.

Missing Persons / Beacon Theatre / NYC — August 24, 1984. My aunt Shannon and I were in the second row directly in front of my drumming idol Terry Bozzio and his bullet-proof electronic drum kit. Opened with “Mental Hopscotch.” I was so excited that I barely remember the show. They ended by debuting their new video on a screen.

The Smiths / Beacon Theatre / NYC — June 18, 1985. Long story about this one in Sunshine. My uncle and I ended up backstage with The Smiths, and during the last song, tons of audience members danced on stage. Opened with “Meat is Murder.”

Tears For Fears / Brigham Young University / Provo, UT — September 7, 1985. I’d already seen them once on Songs from the Big Chair, and this time, the BYU arena was completely silent during an opening prayer.

Divinyls / The Ritz / NYC — December 8, 1985. Before “I Touch Myself” - just a great rock band with one of the most powerful, interesting front people.

INXS / Salt Palace Convention Center / Salt Lake City, UT — February 18, 1986. Such a good rock band, before they were huge.

Depeche Mode / Radio City Music Hall / NYC — June 6, 1986. Black Celebration tour and my uncle and I could feel the balcony shake from people dancing.

The Cure / Pier 84 / NYC — July 8, 1986. Five years after my mom and I stood outside listening to Pat Benatar and Billy Squier, I was back with my uncle listening to The Cure. We couldn’t afford tickets, but I remember hearing songs from The Head on the Door well enough to stay for a while. There’s something powerful about not being able to see a show—about missing an important sense—that makes the other senses stronger.

Eurythmics / Parkwest / Park City, Utah — August 13, 1986. One of the best venues ever: a ski mountain that put on big shows in the summer. What impressed me most about Eurythmics (other than Annie Lennox’s voice!) was that they were a big band who played the complex electronic elements of their records in a much more human way live.

Potatoheads / some kid’s parents’ back yard party / Salt Lake City, UT — fall 1986. I was a sophomore in high school and had just started a band with some juniors and a senior, and suddenly I was at a cool party where the best punk band in town jumped on “stage” for a 3-song impromptu set. These were people 5 or 6 years older than me, in a real band, doing what I wanted to do. Then the cops came.

Descendents / Central City Multipurpose Center / Salt Lake City, UT — November 28, 1986. I was 14, preppy, scared of punks, and l loved seeing record store nerds, hippies, and punks all in the same place. Potatoheads opened.

Descendents / Maxwell’s / Hoboken, NJ — June 20, 1987. My uncle Alan took me on his motorcycle and the band went on at 1am. Tiny club, packed, they were somehow even better than the last time I’d seen them. Alan—a jazz musician—described it as “organized chaos.” We tried to beat an incoming storm back to Alan’s NYC apartment and almost made it, but then got drenched in the last few blocks.

Fishbone / Fitzgerald’s / Houston, TX — November 25, 1987. Brown / Black / white kids all moshing together to the tightest, craziest Black band. The luckiest I’ve ever felt at a show. I wrote the liner notes to the 40th anniversary edition of In Your Face—based on this show—that’s coming soon.

Iron Maiden / Guns N’ Roses / Salt Palace / Salt Lake City, UT — June 3, 1988. This was the last day of my junior year of high school and GNR was blowing up. So much testosterone in the arena that the air actually felt violent.

Siouxsie and the Banshees / California Theatre / San Diego, CA — November 6, 1988. My mom and I were looking at colleges and saw that Siouxsie was playing. Amazing show in an old theatre. I remember hearing a new band, Jane’s Addiction, constantly on every college radio station on that trip.

Metallica + Queensryche / Salt Palace / Salt Lake City, UT — December 16, 1988. As a senior in high school, this show felt more important than graduation. Opened with “Blackened.”

Living Colour / Speedway Cafe / Salt Lake City, UT — February 13, 1989. The band looked more confused than I felt, playing for a packed, mostly white crowd. Decades later, the guitarist Vernon Reid told me that he remembers it as one of the most fun shows of the tour. Opened with “Middle Man.”

Jane’s Addiction / Fairgrounds Coliseum / Salt Lake City, UT — March 19, 1989. I stayed home most of spring break to see this show. The band was really bad—felt like they didn’t want to be there—but it was the first show where I saw something important happening: goths, jocks, metalheads, punks were all there and nobody looked out of place. Opened with “Up The Beach,” obvs.

New Order + P.I.L. + The Sugarcubes / Parkwest / Park City, Utah — June 18, 1989. I remember wishing that this was in a shittier venue because I wanted New Order and Johnny Lydon to scare me, which was difficult on a beautiful mountain outside in the summer.

The Stench / Bad Yodelers / Cinema Bar / Salt Lake City, UT — summer 1989. Two local punk/metal-ish bands who I loved and felt like they could have gone further. I felt sad that it was the last show I’d see in SLC before heading off to college in Tacoma.

Soundgarden / Moore Theatre / Seattle, WA — October 7, 1989. Not sad anymore. This ushered in grunge and made me wish I could grow my hair like Chris Cornell’s. The first of dozens of life-affirming shows at Seattle’s incredible, spooky Moore Theatre. Opened with “Flower.”

R.E.M. / Memorial Coliseum / Portland, OR — October 13, 1989 — Right when they got huge and I regretted missing them at smaller venues in SLC, but I couldn’t go to everything.

24‑7 Spyz + Primus / Speedway Cafe / Salt Lake City, UT — July 29, 1990. Home for summer after freshman year and I think this show was $5. I would have paid $500.

Danzig + Soundgarden / Fairgrounds Coliseum / Salt Lake City, UT — July 31, 1990. Danzig’s drummer played on a riser that must have been 10 feet tall, and when I think about the show, there’s still a huge haze of smoke between me and the band. And the muscles, of course.

Jane’s Addiction + Pixies + Primus / Seattle Center Arena / Seattle, WA December 9, 1990. The dream alt rock lineup. We stood in line for most of Primus but I finally got to see Pixies, who played an angry set with bright white backlighting and excessive volume. Jane’s more than redeemed themselves. Opened with “Up The Beach,” again, obvs.

Nirvana / O.K. Hotel / Seattle, WA — April 17, 1991. I wrote about this one for Rolling Stone. No show has ever affected me as strongly. I felt depressed when I left. How could 3 people be so powerful? How could I go on without hearing these songs again (they hadn’t yet recorded Nevermind)? It made me want to stop playing and stop listening to music. Opened with “Polly.”

Nirvana / The Pompadour / Salt Lake City, UT — June 11, 1991. I got to hear “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” “Breed,” and “Drain You” again and it felt like I already knew them. They opened for Dinosaur Jr. but my friend and I left. I grabbed Nirvana’s set list off the stage and I still have it.

Smashing Pumpkins / The Pompadour / Salt Lake City, UT — August 23, 1991. Billy with long hair and a psychedelic painted guitar. It felt like they were hungry. They played most of Gish and more, and the guitar solos were so loud that they were physical. Opened with “Snail.”

Nirvana / Beehive Records / Seattle, WA — September 16, 1991. The famous live in-store a week before Nevermind came out. I brought all of my bootleg 7” singles and had them signed by the band. This was my last great Nirvana show. I saw the Halloween Paramount show and others but it never seemed like they were comfortable in a big venue.

Teenage Fanclub / Afghan Whigs / RKCNDY / Seattle, WA — April 20, 1992. My first time at the legendary RKCNDY, which had just opened. I loved Afghan Whigs’ Congregation (still do), and loved them as a grunge band with long hair in shorts and T-shirts, before they became classy.

Drive Like Jehu / The Off Ramp / Seattle, WA — summer 1992. Another show that made me depressed—I’d never be in a band that good. They opened for Supersuckers and not many people were in the room. I was mad that people from Sub Pop were in the bar instead of the show room. Opened with “Caress.”

Seaweed, My Name, Flop, Sage / Temple Theatre / Tacoma, WA — September 19, 1992. Seaweed and My Name were the two big bands from Tacoma, and it was a big deal that two Seattle bands came down to open for them. Opened with “Baggage.”

Faith No More + Babes in Toyland + Kyuss / Paramount / Seattle, WA — January 15, 1993. I could swear that this show was moved to the smaller Moore Theatre, but everything online says it was at the Paramount. This was the Angel Dust tour, a dark, scary album in a dark, scary venue (if it indeed was the Moore). Opened with “Caffeine.”

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Monster Magnet / RKCNDY / Seattle, WA — March 21, 1993. They supposedly opened for White Zombie but I remember them headlining, maybe I just left early. Felt like a different decade with so much volume and fuzz.

Sonic Youth / La Luna / Portland, OR — March 7, 1993. My friends and I would sometimes drive 2 hours south to Portland instead of 45 minutes north to Seattle because La Luna was such a great venue. This was the Dirty tour, and they opened with “Shoot,” the slowest, spaciest song.

Zeke / Milton clubhouse / Milton, WA — spring 1993. I probably saw Zeke a dozen times in ‘93/’94. They played so fast and so hard, and this weird strip mall venue felt like their home base.

Sunny Day Real Estate / The Weathered Wall / Seattle, WA — September 2, 1993. It was all about the guitar interplay for me. Got to see them several times before Diary and I still wish that the guitars were as up front on the album as they were at those shows.

Rocket From The Crypt / Crocodile Cafe / Seattle, WA — February 20, 1994. This was packed, and felt like a party. Rocket was like The Ramones, James Brown, The Kinks, and Elvis, all at once. They didn’t become the biggest band in the world but everyone at this show thought they would.

Mudhoney / Seattle Center Mural Amphitheater / Seattle, WA — July 8, 1994. I filled in as the drummer for The Lemons when their guy broke his arm. We practiced a few times and then opened this show for 7,000 people. Mudhoney felt like the biggest band in the world on this day, and people were excited that David Lee Roth was in the crowd.

Hole + Veruca Salt / Moore Theatre / Seattle, WA — November 14, 1994. Kurt had died 7 months earlier and Live Through This came out around the same time. I was 22, in Seattle, working at Easy Street Records, playing in a real band (I joined The Lemons after that Mudhoney show). Matt, my boss, and I went backstage and got our photo taken with Louise and Nina from Veruca Salt. There were more women in the audience than at other shows I saw and it felt like something changed that night. Opened with “Plump” and the place went fucking crazy.

Shudder To Think / Moe / Seattle, WA — November 27, 1994. Pony Express Record remains one of my favorites. I saw them the night before and it was so good that I went back for an even better show. Opened with “Gang of $.”

Cheap Trick / Under The Rail / Seattle, WA — February 22, 1995. My band opened and the power went out on us twice. Robin Zander’s voice was perfect and the band was amazing until they walked off when one of the Supersuckers’ girlfriends tossed a firecracker on stage.

PJ Harvey / Moore Theatre / Seattle, WA — May 22, 1995. Felt like a seance. She wore black eye makeup and it turned to black tears during the opener, “To Bring You My Love.”

Bush + The Toadies / Moe / Seattle, WA — February 6, 1995. Hear me out. I went to a lot of shows for free thanks to my record store job. I wasn’t surprised when Toadies were great, but I was surprised when Bush was. They sounded perfect and dude looked amazing. I hated that I got it.

Liz Phair / Moore Theatre / Seattle, WA — April 13, 1995. She played solo, which made the songs even better. All the record store nerds got to meet Liz after the show and when my friend Adam told her that he worked at Guido’s Pizza, not a record store, she said that her favorite pizza item was $100 bills.

Portishead / Moe / Seattle, WA — April 17, 1995. This felt like a special night—like we all couldn’t believe this band actually came all the way to Seattle. I think it was seated.

Heavy Vegetable + Skiploader / Java Jump / Fife, WA — fall 1995. Skiploader were friends and they insisted I’d love the San Diego band Heavy Vegetable (Rob Crow’s band back then). I did, and I still do. Their set was like one long melodic, mathy Zappa song.

No Doubt / ??? / Philadelphia, PA — October 2, 1995. My band was on tour with the Dance Hall Crashers and after our early show, we hopped on the DHC tour bus to go see their friends’ band. There were maybe 20 people in the audience and they KILLED. By the end of the year No Doubt was the biggest band in the world.

Joan Jett / The Catalyst / Santa Cruz, CA — June 1996. Got to open for her 2 nights in a row and we were super nervous. Her manager told us we should play for 20 minutes but we played for 30.

Marilyn Manson + L7 / Moore Theatre / Seattle, WA — January 18, 1997. Over the top production with flames and ashes falling from above. Felt more like a dark, expensive Broadway musical. Volume and sensory overload.

Pantera / Mercer Arena / Seattle, WA — April 2, 1997. My bandmate and I were the only people wearing glasses and I felt like a junior high kid that was going to be beat up. Sketchy, scary crowd. Sketchy, scary band.

Sleater‑Kinney / Crocodile Cafe / Seattle, WA — June 8, 1997. Dig Me Out had just been released and this felt like an exciting moment—like I was seeing someone important at the right time.

David Bowie / Paramount Theatre / Seattle, WA — September 7, 1997. I remember thinking he looked and sounded amazing for someone so old. He was 50.

Tito Puente / Dimitrio’s Jazz Alley / Seattle, WA — February 4, 1998. Tito barely played but his band was so good, and he was like his own hype man, just smiling and hitting the timbales when he felt like it.

Death Cab for Cutie + Harvey Danger / Bellingham, WA — spring 1998? DCFC must have been 21-ish and good beyond their years. Everyone in the room was either blown away or angry/jealous because they were in a band that wasn’t as good.

Radiohead / Paramount / Seattle, WA — April 5, 1998. Touring OK Computer and this was a big venue, but it still felt like it was way too small, like nobody could get a ticket. Opened with “Airbag.”

The Cardigans / King Cat Theatre / Seattle, WA — February 13, 1999. I’d seen the First Band on the Moon tour a couple of years earlier and this felt like them coming back with a darker album and a darker disposition. The guitars sounded broken, on purpose. Opened with super slow and morose “Marvel Hill.”

TLC / Seattle Arena / Seattle, WA — January 10, 2000. This felt kind of like a kids’ show with cheap costumes and production, but the 3 women on stage were effervescent, and the good songs were so good.

Weezer / The Casbah / San Diego, CA — June 20, 2000. My band opened for Weezer’s secret show ahead of their reunion tour (before the green album). The show was great, but the sound check was even better—several songs from Pinkerton with only a few other people in the room for a private show.

Deftones / Studio X / Seattle, WA — October 12, 2000. I’d seen them before at RKCNDY and in an arena opening for Ozzy and Korn. They’d just released White Pony, and as a record store guy, I got to go to things like this—a live session with 30 or so people in a fancy recording studio where they played most of the new album.

Queens of the Stone Age / The Breakroom / Seattle, WA — October 28, 2000. My first of many times seeing Queens. The label rep called that afternoon and said “Everyone bailed from the list so you have a +11.” The show was sold out, so I gave away tickets, refusing money but accepting drinks.

Broadcast / The Breakroom / Seattle, WA — October 31, 2000? I can’t find this online but I think it’s right - I remember it being Halloween. I was pissed because they cancelled a signing at Sonic Boom that day, but the show was incredible. Much more rock than the album.

The White Stripes / Sit ‘n Spin / Seattle, WA — December 2, 2000. Crazy seeing them in a tiny club but at the time it felt perfect with just 2 of them on stage. Every song was so catchy, and the way they each played was so different but complimentary. I loved the albums, but it really made sense in person.

Bad Brains / St. Andrew’s Hall / Detroit, MI — June 23, 2001. My band played nearby and a couple of us ran off the stage and into a taxi to catch this show. It was the original lineup, and HR still held it together, mostly sitting while he sang.

Sugar Ray / Six Flags Over Texas / Arlington, TX — May 26, 2002. My band did a few weeks of shows with them at universities and amusement parks. The whole thing felt like a surreal dream. Sugar Ray were super nice guys and overdelivered on stage every night. We rode roller coasters every day after sound check.

N.E.R.D. w/ Kelis / Showbox / Seattle, WA — June 12, 2002. I loved the N.E.R.D. album and they brought out pre-Milkshake Kelis for the best song, “Truth or Dare.” Spymob was the backing band.

Yeah Yeah Yeahs + The Icarus Line / The Showbox / Seattle, WA — March 27, 2003. I remember thinking that everyone who wasn’t at this show was blowing it.

TV On The Radio / SXSW / Austin, TX — March 20, 2004. The line outside was huge and I barely got in and could hardly see the band. But I heard “Staring at the Sun” so everything was great.

Joanna Newsom / Triple Door / Seattle, WA — October 4, 2004. The power that came from her voice and harp in a beautiful venue was unreal.

System of a Down + The Mars Volta / Key Arena / Seattle, WA — October 5, 2005. I recall sitting in “the industry section” and all of us looking surprised to see one another. Like, “You like this band, too?” TMV played 2 long songs, one in Spanish.

The Strokes / Crocodile Cafe / Seattle, WA — January 6, 2006. I’d seen a couple of ok Strokes shows so I went in with low expectations. This was an underplay around the release of their third album. Opened with that killer Tom Petty sounding jam.

Serena Maneesh / SPOT Festival / Aarhus, Denmark — spring 2006. I’ve been to this festival a few times and I’m always shocked at how incredible the sound is in every venue, big or small. I was right up front and this was so physical and visceral.

Bjork / Sasquatch Festival / George, WA — May 26, 2007. The tour with an epic, all-female horn section. Sarah Silverman was the emcee and she was dating Jimmy Kimmel at the time, so he was just hanging out, lying on the grass by himself, hiding in plain sight.

Lykke Li / Knitting Factory / NYC — October 29, 2007. I worked with El Perro del Mar, and her manager invited me to this show where 20 people watched 19-year-old LL kill it.

Aimee Mann / Cain’s Ballroom / Tulsa, OK — June 16, 2008. Jason, my Sonic Boom partner and I spent a very long 2 days in someone’s Tulsa garage buying a big record collection. This was our end of trip celebration.

Deerhoof + Wildbirds & Peacedrums / Le Poisson Rouge / NYC — September 15, 2009. Ten of the shows on this list could be Deerhoof, but I chose this one because I was so close to the stage. Something about Deerhoof shows makes me smile more than any other band.

Sharon Van Etten / some loft party / Brooklyn, NY — November 22, 2009. This was the same night as Camera Obscura at Music Hall of Williamsburg and I remember zipping back and forth. I’d never heard of Sharon, who played a jaw-dropping solo set.

Kanye West / Coachella / Indio, CA — April 2011. It takes a certain kind of person to perform alone on a massive stage in front of 100,000 people.

Black Breath - The Acheron / Brooklyn, NY —July 6, 2012. My first time seeing my favorite Seattle metal band.

Prince / City Winery / NYC — August 2, 2013. Came straight from seeing The Cult uptown after getting a notification that Prince was playing this tiny club. Late show, mostly deep cuts. Incredible.

Kamasi Washington + Pharoah Sanders + The Sun Ra Arkestra / Greenpoint Terminal / Brooklyn, NY — May 8, 2016. I was shocked and thrilled to see so many young people at this show. My first time seeing Kamasi and the 2 drummers really got me.

Geese / Slipper Room / NYC — January 2018. I’m tired of people dissing Geese for coming out of nowhere. This show was over eight years ago and the band was very good then… and in high school. They’ve played hundreds of shows since.

Damon Locks and The Black Monument Ensemble / Chicago Humanities Festival — Chicago, IL, November 1, 2019. My friend and I flew to Chicago just for this show and we sat in the front row, which I never do. It reminded me how great it feels to be this close to a band.

The Cure / Xcel Energy Center / St. Paul, MN — June 8, 2023. The show was great, but I was more taken by Robert Smith’s insistence on cheap tickets around the globe—some as low as $20. Thousands of people who would have never seen The Cure finally got to on this tour, and it’s hard not to connect this show to the one in 1986 where my uncle and I listened from outside because we couldn’t afford tickets.

Taylor Swift / Arrowhead Stadium / Kansas City, MO — July 8, 2023. I took my wife AJ on her birthday and it was still early enough in the tour that we didn’t know everything going in. I loved that most of the men’s rooms were turned into women’s rooms, and I’ve never heard a louder crowd, ever. Also the night Taylor met Travis.

The Blood Brothers / Irving Plaza / NYC — December 14, 2024. I saw The Blood Brothers several times in Seattle when they were kids but this reunion show was somehow better. They’re all around 40, in amazing shape, and they played every song I wanted to hear. Opened with the song that goes “Fire! Fire! Fire!”

Air / Brooklyn Paramount / Brooklyn, NY — October 11, 2025. I’ve liked their records for years and kept hearing how great this tour was. How great could an electronic band be? Really, really great.

Phew. I think thats 100.

My guest on Identified this week is the acclaimed chef and author Camille Becarra. Born in Puerto Rico to a Puerto Rican mother and Cuban father, Camille moved to New Jersey at just one year old and grew up between cultures, languages, and generations.

My memoir is called My Life in the Sunshine. You can order it here, or listen to the audiobook on Spotify.

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Order "My Life in the Sunshine"

Watch: CBS Saturday Morning Segment

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Four years ago, on January 20, 2022, I published a Substack post called It’s my 50th birthday / I wrote a book. Now that book has been out for three-and-a-half years, and if you’re good at math, you can figure out exactly how old I am—and that once again, it’s my birthday. What’s less obvious is that this is somehow my 99th Substack post.

This started as a promotional vehicle for my book. A way to talk about that process and to promote book tour events—an email list with a permanent archive, thanks to the easy-to-use Substack interface (no, they’re not sponsoring this post).

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I love writing these every two weeks or so, and I try to keep them fairly low pressure, often viewing them more as long Instagram posts, especially when they’re prompted by a photograph, which is often the case.

Some of these posts have been more serious, and more writerly, like On Gently Crashing My Father’s Memorial, and 24 Hours in Holly Springs, Mississippi.

Many are somehow connected to music, like this one about four massive rock bands who were all between drummers around the same time, or this one about The Song of the Summer.

And some posts simply exist because it felt like time to publish something—to remind myself that even if I don’t always have something important to say or write, it’s still important to write something. Bigger thoughts and pieces have emerged from the most frivolous posts, a reminder that in any creative endeavor, the hardest and most important part can often be just starting it. Just doing something.

What I get out of writing these is hard to quantify, but I know when I stop, I miss it. This is where writing stays casual for me. I don’t have to explain myself too much or justify why a piece exists. It’s a place to try things, to follow small curiosities, and to remember that writing doesn’t always need to have a goal. Sometimes it just needs to exist with a date, a photograph, and a subject line.

I feel the pressure to do something big for post number 100, but please don’t mistake my pressured feeling for a promise. I don’t have a huge plan. Maybe it should just be a short 100-word post? Or a list of my 100 favorite albums of all time. Or 100 reasons why I’ve never really been into sports. Maybe I should pull 100 photographs randomly from my phone and caption each one.

The most likely scenario is that I’ll figure it out last minute, like I usually do. And that’s probably the point. These posts exist because I keep coming back, not because I have a plan. One hundred just happens to be the next excuse.

This Thursday in Los Angeles, I’ll host a live episode of my podcast, Identified, with Matt Berninger from The National as my guest. It’s Thursday Jan. 29 at the beautiful Wrensilva space in West Hollywood. More info HERE.

My guest on Identified this week is Traci Thomas, creator and host of The Stacks Podcast. In this episode, Traci opens up about growing up mixed-race with older parents, navigating loss at a young age, and the impact of her Black and Jewish heritage on how she views belonging.

My memoir is called My Life in the Sunshine. You can order it here, or listen to the audiobook on Spotify.

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Identified podcast

Order "My Life in the Sunshine"

Watch: CBS Saturday Morning Segment

Read: Washington Post Profile

Listen: BBC Outlook Interview

Then at some point, probably in my 30s, the photos started to matter. I’d flip through an album when I visited my mother, or she’d send me a few in the mail—acting like she knew I liked them, but also clearly making an effort to clean out. Eventually, I had a big box of about 600 photos. Some were baby pictures with my mother and my uncle, both young and visibly excited, and also not quite sure what to do with me. Many are in brilliant ’70s color, with greens and oranges bursting from the corners. Others feel more stately in black and white, with thick white borders. I love them all, but I remain most interested in the ones from age two to about nine: still a scrappy kid who didn’t yet have braces or a haircut from anyone other than my mother. They’re littered with drums, bikes, Halloween costumes, Kiss memorabilia—it’s a photographic commercial for the 1970s.

During the pandemic, I finally took the time to organize and scan every photo—placing each one in what felt like the correct order based on the faint printed dates on the backs of some of the glossy 3x5s, or by the outfits I wore, the size of my Afro, or the beat-up-ness of my drum set. And now I never look at them. I don’t need to—they’re ingrained in my memory, like the cheat sheet you make for a test and never actually need (or so I’ve heard). I have the catalog. The exercise is complete.

Then, a few weeks ago, someone got in touch via Facebook Messenger:

Hello Nabil, I knew your mom and you in the late 70’s. I used to come to Cambridge to visit and check you out as a drummer. You were about 6 or so, played the drums so well I was amazed. Then you moved to Amherst and I lost touch with you and your mom. I’m a Baha’i from Boston. Here’s a photo of us in the late 70’s. We had a good time together.

It’s one thing to always know your childhood photos, and another to re-familiarize yourself with them by cataloging them as an adult. But it’s something else entirely to receive a 40-something-year-old photo you’ve never seen. These aren’t my favorite kid photos—I’m not even smiling in one of them—but they’re an incredible snapshot of a time and place. Likely around 1977 in Cambridge, when I’m five. It looks like we’re in a photo booth in a store, and I honestly don’t remember the drummer who was friends with my mother and held onto these photos all that time.

This has only happened to me once before. In 2018, someone else reached out—also on Facebook, and also a Baha’i—with five photos of me, my mother, and my uncle at a wedding in Cambridge. I wrote about that experience in My Life in the Sunshine—how powerful the photos were and how serendipitous the timing felt, arriving alongside some important paternal connections.

Those photos felt heavier and more emotional. This feels lighter, more fun. In the top photo, it looks like someone told us both to act serious. In the bottom one, it looks like someone told us to act normal—which for me then, and apparently for my adult drumming accomplice, meant a big smile.

Looking at these pictures feels like I get to re-live a moment of my childhood—like I thought I knew every moment, 600 of them at least, and now I have one more. I wish it were a video with a quick snippet of my voice. I wish I could ask what we had for lunch right before the photo, or what songs we played on drums afterward. But I’ll never know.

Instead, I get to live with one of my favorite things about old photographs: no context, no answers, no captions to fill in the gaps. Just proof that even a childhood I thought I’d fully accounted for still has room to surprise me.

My guest on Identified this week is the acclaimed comedian, actor, and musician Tim Heidecker for an unexpectedly candid conversation about ancestry, grief, and identity. Tim traces the impact of family tragedy across generations—from the death of his grandfather’s mother in childbirth, to the sudden loss of a sibling in his father’s childhood, and how that subtly shaped his own upbringing in suburban Pennsylvania.

My memoir is called My Life in the Sunshine. You can order it here, or listen to the audiobook on Spotify.

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Identified podcast

Order "My Life in the Sunshine"

Watch: CBS Saturday Morning Segment

Read: Washington Post Profile

Listen: BBC Outlook Interview

Subscribe now

Which is why I’m always surprised around this time of year, when everyone starts reflecting on their favorite books, records, movies, and moments, and I realize I haven’t kept track of any of it. No running list. No folder. No note buried in my phone. The most important list is the one I don’t keep at all—digitally, physically, or even consciously. Every December feels like starting from scratch, trusting that whatever I can still remember must have earned its place. Or maybe that’s the point: if it doesn’t come to mind now, it probably didn’t need to.

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So this isn’t a definitive list, or even a particularly organized one. It’s just a handful of things from 2025 that stuck—the moments that showed up when I stopped and thought about the year in late December.

I didn’t have a clear favorite album this year. Instead, it was more about songs, which concerns me a little, given that I was raised on albums and work in an album-focused corner of the music business. But when I think about it, that isn’t new. Songs jumped out at me as a kid, and they still do now—musical moments that serve as the entry point or emotional center of an album. These were a few musical moments that stayed with me.

I’d heard the Australian instrumental doom metal duo Divide and Dissolve before, but this live KEXP session gave me a different view of the band. Their music is heavy, but I experience it as meditative, even soothing—not at all how it’s usually described.

Plosivs’ “Death Kicks In” was a late-November entry, released just as the year was winding down. The lead track from the band’s second album immediately reminded me—in the best way—of its contributors: Drive Like Jehu guitarist John Reis, Heavy Vegetable and Pinback mastermind Rob Crow, and Rocket From The Crypt drummer Atom Willard. It’s a heavy, melodic dirge that somehow feels bright, to the point that I catch myself singing it on my own.

Ecca Vandal’s “CRUISING TO SELF SOOTHE” was pure ear candy for me. The song reminds me of Pixies, Turnstile, and other great guitar bands that balance immediacy with edge. I don’t know much yet about the Sri Lankan / South African / Australian artist, but I have a feeling I’ll know a lot more in 2026.

I loved Turnstile’s album Never Enough, but when I think about it now, what really stands out is the breakdown in “Birds.” I’m a sucker for a breakdown—the half-time shift—and this one gets me every time.

And this list wouldn’t feel honest without including PLEASE COME TO ME, an album I released by Masma Dream World. It’s the only music here with no guitars, yet it’s the most intense thing on the list for me. This live WFMU session captures that perfectly.

It felt like a particularly busy year for live music, with so many bands reuniting or continuing to tour. Nine Inch Nails at Brooklyn’s Barclays Center was elegant and powerful—and, most importantly, not too long. Deerhoof, a band I’ve been seeing for nearly 30 years now, somehow never disappoints; if anything, they might be better than ever. The French electronic band Air surprised me with how human and alive their show felt. And I never imagined that 30 years after last seeing them, I’d find myself packed into the Mercury Lounge, singing along to Shudder To Think’s anti-hit “X-French Tee Shirt.”

I’m always fascinated by the guests I get to interview on my podcast, Identified, but my favorite interview of 2025 wasn’t for the show. It was a nearly 90-minute public conversation with Henry Rollins at Versofest in Westport, Connecticut. Rollins answered questions in concise, five-minute bursts that somehow managed to fully respond, tell a story, and entertain a packed room all at once. I’ve never been so nervous beforehand, or so relieved afterward.

I didn’t read a ton this year, and I didn’t see many movies. I’m sure I watched too much TV. But if I collapse all of those forms into one, the best thing I consumed in 2025 was Jad Abumrad’s podcast Fela Kuti: Fear No Man. The ten-episode series has the narrative depth of a great book, the momentum of a thriller, and the immediacy of a great TV show. The way it weaves together music, history, and interviews—old and new—is remarkable. It sounds effortless, which is usually a sign of just how much work went into it.

That’s what comes to mind. I’m sure more memories will surface as soon as I publish this, which feels about right. Maybe that’s enough to carry into 2026.

Happy holidays,

Nabil

My guest on Identified this week is the rapper Cakes Da Killa, who reflects on growing up in Teaneck, New Jersey, raised by his teenage mother and grandmother. He shares openly about the complexities of reconciling with an absent father, discovering inherited traits in unexpected family members, and why chosen family has always played a central role in his life.

My memoir is called My Life in the Sunshine. You can order it here, or listen to the audiobook on Spotify.

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Two musicians died this year who lived on opposite sides of an important divide for me: Jimmy Cliff, whose music filled my childhood home, and Ace Frehley from Kiss, the first band I truly chose for myself. I didn’t think much about either of them in recent years, but their deaths pulled me right back into the earliest versions of who I was—before I knew anything about taste, identity, or what music meant to me.

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I always find it interesting how little I can think about someone, and how important they can become once they’re not here anymore. Take Jimmy Cliff, for example. I’ve always known that The Harder They Come was the first movie I ever saw—it came out in 1972, the year I was born, and although I doubt I saw it as a newborn, I was definitely young enough to not remember it. But I remember the album, with its colorful movie-like cover, playing in our house constantly. I can hear “You Can Get It If You Really Want” in my head right now, and I swear it sounds exactly the same as it did back then, spinning on a rickety turntable in our extremely warm or slightly freezing basement apartment in Cambridge, Mass.

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When Jimmy Cliff died a few weeks ago, I watched The Harder They Come, and I realized I hadn’t seen it since that first time. As I watched, eagerly waiting for a scene that felt familiar—a bridge back to the past—none of it did. It was more like watching it for the first time. Cliff is magnetic in it, and if you haven’t seen the movie—or haven’t seen it lately—you should. It’s uplifting, tragic, deeply musical, and a visual time capsule of outfits, hairstyles, cars, and slang that’s wildly entertaining in all the best ways.

Ace Frehley from Kiss, on the other hand, felt more present over the years—I’d seen Kiss live several times over the decades, both with and without Ace in the band. It’s impossible to overstate my fandom as a kid born in the ’70s. Destroyer was the first record I bought on my own—italicized because it really just means that it jumped off the shelf and my mom bought it. The music hasn’t aged particularly well, but the feelings remain: excitement, power, mystery. Ace was never my favorite—that might be Gene, because he scared me the most—but Ace always seemed the most likeable, which has become more important to me as I hold on to this leftover childhood love for Kiss. He also seemed the most in on the joke. There’s an amazing 1979 interview where Tom Snyder coaxes him into full-on slapstick humor and uncontrollable laughter. It’s worth the 90 seconds just to see Gene’s perfect “fuck you” smile.

I was disappointed to see the surviving members of Kiss shake hands with President Trump as they received the Kennedy Center Honors last week, and it was the first time I was glad Ace wasn’t there. Based on that Tom Snyder interview, though, I can’t help but wonder what he would have done if he were.

Thinking about Jimmy Cliff and Ace Frehley in the same breath feels strange, but they represent two versions of myself I rarely think about—the kid absorbing whatever his mother played at home, and the kid discovering what he wanted to love on his own. Their deaths made me more aware of those early musical foundations, the ones you don’t pick and the ones you do—or the ones that pick you.

I recently spent an hour discussing one of my favorite albums of all time, Shudder To Think’s 1994 masterpiece Pony Express Record, on the DC Rock History podcast. I also wrote about the album a few posts ago.

My guest on Identified this week is Bandsplain podcast host , who shares a moving, honest account of growing up Iranian-American in 1980s Los Angeles. Yasi discusses her family’s immigration story post-Iranian revolution, her experience being the “other” in a predominantly white community, and the identity conflict that shaped her early life—including moments of rebellion in pursuit of American assimilation.

My memoir is called My Life in the Sunshine. You can order it here, or listen to the audiobook on Spotify.

Happy Holidays!

—Nabil

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Identified podcast

Order "My Life in the Sunshine"

Watch: CBS Saturday Morning Segment

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I first started writing in 2016—fun stories about the bands I used to play in and the record store I used to co-own. After I published a couple of small pieces, I grew more comfortable writing about more personal topics, and although I hadn’t yet shared any of those pieces, I was deep into stories about my father and my racial background—both topics I generally tried to avoid.

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When I did 23andMe in early 2018, the walls came down. That led to the discovery of my paternal family tree, which led me to one enslaved man, Isaac Ayers, born in Alabama around 1824. That’s the short version; there’s a whole book about the long version. :) Wanting to share my story and hopefully connect with more people, I pitched NPR’s Code Switch, who, to my surprise, agreed to work with me. It took months of hard work and frustrating pauses (which my editor warned me about). I couldn’t wait to get the story out, and by October 2018, we were finally ready. The story was done, scheduled to run in late October.

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Then I got an email from my editor: “I know I said October, but we’d like to move it to Thanksgiving—the most family of holidays—where we can give it a lot of attention.” Of course I agreed. NPR’s push on social media brought a ton of eyes to the piece, including some belonging to my first cousin and my aunt, whom I’d never been in touch with.

Things grew from there. More connections surfaced, and now that there’s a book, it keeps happening.

Seven years later, I just had lunch in LA with cousins who aren’t really “new” anymore. Last week I spent time with my new sister (also not so new) in London, playing games with her one-year-old daughter—my new niece. The number of family members I now text “Happy Thanksgiving” is truly daunting, something I never imagined as someone who grew up alone with my mother.

So on Thanksgiving, as much as I love stuffing and pumpkin pie, what I really look forward to is texting all these people. My favorite part is that there are actually too many to remember. More every year.

Here’s to another year of celebrating—and collecting—family, whatever that means to you.

—Nabil

When I was a kid, my mother and I lived in Cambridge, Mass while she went to Bunker Hill Community College. We’d moved up from New York because my uncle Alan was studying at Berklee. My mom worked part-time at Harvard’s Widener Library, which somehow got me a scholarship to the Radcliffe preschool next door.

We left when I was five, and I’ve barely spent any time in Boston since—just a few quick tour stops over the years. I recently spent a couple of days in Boston speaking to students at both Harvard and Berklee, and I’m here to report that there’s no need to worry about Gen Z. Everything is fine. Those kids are smart, kind, motivated, hard working, creative, musical, and ready to take our jobs.

One of my favorite Identified episodes yet is this week’s with Massima Bell on her journey growing up between rural Iowa and urban cities, discovering her gender identity, and navigating family relationships.

My memoir is called My Life in the Sunshine. You can order it here, or listen to the audiobook on Spotify.

Website Tweet IG FB LinkedIn Playlists

Identified podcast

Order "My Life in the Sunshine"

Watch: CBS Saturday Morning Segment

Read: Washington Post Profile

Listen: BBC Outlook Interview