Two years into regularly posting articles on Substack, I feel like it’s important to take a step back and consider where I was back then and where I am now.

A couple of months removed from quitting my job as a daily news reporter after 17 years as a journalist, I was recalibrating my life, seeking purpose by writing about what I loved -- music -- rather than continuing to tread water down a path that led to “enough” money and stability. It was irrational and impractical for a 42-year-old dude, I thought, but I felt like I was out of options.

I wanted to better balance my life by not putting all of the perceived value of my existence into a career that left me stressed, obsessed with my work and with little time to devote mentally toward anything I would consider to be a dream or a goal. I wanted more time to spend with my family and friends and I wanted to be someone who woke up every day with a sense of purpose.

One of the first writers on Substack I naturally gravitated toward when I launched Radio Amor was Matthew Carlson, aka Matty C, whose What Am I Making newsletter offered a variety of inspirational posts about why people created, with Matty being the conduit for delivering it to the rest of the Substack platform.

I was immediately drawn to Matty C’s story, which I felt mirrored mine in several ways. He left his job a year before I did because it was suffocating and unfulfilling, opting to throw caution to the wind and do the work that really mattered, as he often puts it.

Matty C is a Lansing, Michigan-based musician with experience in bands including The Stick Arounds and Harborcoat, in addition to being a podcast producer, radio host, cultural consumer and writer. He felt his more secure corporate gig wasn’t affording him the time to do the work he wanted to do … and so he left it all behind, splitting his time as a rideshare driver, touring musician and writer on Substack. To be frank, it moved me to tears how similar my circumstances felt to his -- almost like looking in a mirror in seeing someone 10 years older than me coming to the same realization and deciding now was the time to take control of their life.

This, of course, doesn’t happen without a support system. In my case, my wife was both the stable breadwinner and on board with me trying to figure out how to be a freelance journalist who went after the stories that motivated me while pairing that with another less stressful part-time job that helped pay the bills. I can’t go forward without acknowledging that this big, bold risk couldn’t have been done without that safety net. Many people don’t have that luxury.

I drove Uber Eats for more than a year and struggled to identify how to be a freelance writer. To be honest, there were many times when I felt very small and pathetic in this endeavor and wondered if I had made a huge mistake. I didn’t tell many people in my circle about what I was doing because I was ashamed of my meager earnings and outcomes. Small paychecks, tight bottom lines and tough conversations were had about what I was doing with my life.

But like Matty, I feel like the time I’ve been given to figure out what my life is all about has guided me to a much better reality. I’ve more recently worked a job that I love with the local parks department and made significant progress as a freelance writer, spending my evening hours writing about stuff I truly care about. Technically, I’m working just as hard now as I did before I left my full time career, but my time feels like mine, with more time for doing what I love and having time for the people I love. That feels like progress.

Matty recently concluded a tour in which he saw America in 18 performances over 20 days. He did literally everything, from the booking to the promotion to lugging his gear across the country in his vehicle affectionately named Aretha to fill one of three buckets he identified would constitute a career. He also met a bunch of new friends and connected with old ones during the tour, creating unforgettable memories you simply can’t put a price tag on. He earns money as a musician, Substack writer and by driving Uber and Lyft. In many ways, he’s a north star for me in confirming that you can actually do this if you believe in yourself and your path, as he describes in the interview I did with him below.

“The only drawback is I don’t have that money, Matty C said. “That’s the only drawback. If we really think about it from a grand scheme, that in and of itself, with nothing else, is not a life. That’s survival. So, looking back on it, I realize I should have left long before I left.”

If I could stitch that quote onto a quilt and put it above the door in my bedroom, I would. Matty C is, as they say, “in it for the right reasons.” I would highly recommend subscribing to his Substack if you haven’t already. He pushes out so much meaningful content that urges you to do what the people he talks to regularly on his “What Am I Making” podcast aspire to: “Don’t make it perfect. Just make it,” as the late Arthur Ashe puts it.

I hope you’ll read this Q and A I did with Matty C to understand the payoffs of this type of existence. He talks about the hard work that goes into putting together his own tour, balancing his life to create meaning and how the connections he’s made have fueled his new life as a creator at the age of 54. We should all be so lucky to figure out our purpose in life and do what matters to us. I know I feel lucky.

What Am I Making

Tour Diary: Rockport, MA

It was already a few minutes after seven on Tuesday morning when I got up and around. I dressed for the day, packed up my bags, and brought my gear downstairs to stage it near the door. Meghan was already up and offered me a cup of coffee. We sat in the kitchen chatting about our incredible time together in Manhattan just the day before. I thanked Meghan and Sean for their hospitality and generosity, and finally made my way to Aretha to hit the road…

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9 days ago · 13 likes · Matty C

Radio Amor: Having some time to reflect on your tour, could you take me through some of the highlights?

Matty C: Highlights for me are almost always people. I love playing the shows. I love sightseeing. I love traveling. All of those things. When you set up a tour -- in this run, I had 18 shows in 20 days -- the show itself is basically the signpost for the day. This is the thing you’ve got to do. Everything else is sort of ‘get to do,’ and the show is the one thing that I’m sort of responsible for, and I can build the whole day around the show. And so, for me, it was like, how can I sort of make the most of every day with the people I have around and with the time that I have? And some days I had a day off. I had this amazing day in Manhattan with my friend Megan, and we just had an incredible time and then I had other days where there is no time off; you just drive. So, it’s sort of balancing those two things, but it’s largely how quickly can I get to the people I want to see? Having done this four or five times now, you start to build this network of really amazing people around the country, and so it’s becoming more about how do I get to Durham to see these people or Asheville to see those people than it is to like go, ‘how do I get to this historic site or that battlefield or that museum?’ It’s really how does all that stuff fit into time with these other people? And I think the more I do this, the more I realize that music and the podcast and the other creative work that I do is all just funneling back to the idea of how do we create community?

RA: Why is it important for you to try to put together tours of this magnitude at this point in your career, given everything that’s happened up to this point?

Matty C: I’m in an unusual place a little bit in that I spent 25 years, roughly, playing in bands and doing it as a hobby -- a side hustle. I spent 15 years playing in this band called The Stickarounds, and we got to the point where, when we would go out on the road, I could go out and basically not spend very much money. I could spend no more money and sometimes less money on the road with my friends than I could at home, because we were making enough money that I didn’t have to pay for a room and I didn’t have to pay for a meal once in a while and I didn’t have to pay for a beer once in a while and I never had to pay for gas. So, the stakes were pretty low.

Then when I left my quote unquote big boy job in the summer of 2023, after having a corporate sales gig for you know more than 20 years, I suddenly was in a position where my creative work, if I was going to make this fly, I needed to make it pay a little bit, and so there is some of this that is just capitalistic in nature. This is a way for me to spend time doing a thing that I love and making money instead of getting in a car and driving Lyft or Uber. Above and beyond that, I would go back to saying that it’s about bringing community together and about bringing people together. But the other thing that’s really amazing for me is that every time I go out now, there’s more permission every time I do it. I meet more people, I get more access, I put more numbers in my phone, I have more relationships to go back to the next time I try to book a tour. And so in some respects, one of the reasons I keep doing it is because I keep building these resources and these assets that I can go back to, and it gets easier to do the thing. So it’s really kind of how do I make this sustainable so that it’s a portion of my schedule because I love doing it, and it’s a way for me to generate a certain amount of income?

RA: You mentioned community. Could give a breakdown of when you’re setting up a schedule -- what share of it is people that you’ve of met along the way in your travels of being in bands in the past, and and what share of it is people that you’ve also met through like the Substack community?

Matty C: Yeah, 100% I have on this tour and on previous tours had folks come and see me that I met solely through the Substack community. There’s another Substacker named Jonathan Ytreberg who has a terrific film podcast called The Oscar Project, and Jon came to see me in Buffalo. He lives in Rochester, and he made the one-hour drive over. And so that’s just one example. But there’s a couple different podcast groups that I’m involved in, and I know a bunch of people. I did the math. I played 18 shows, and I think in all but four of them, there was somebody there that I knew from one community or another.

So, whether that’s one podcast or another, somebody that I know from the music community in that town, or somebody that I know through Substack, it’s just sort of building this up. Some of that is when I look at my tour route, I go, where do I know people? I’m not to the point where like I’m looking at my Spotify numbers or I’m looking at my mailing list tens of thousands of fans and going, ‘all right, what are the zip codes that make the most sense?’ It’s usually where do I have a relationship where I think I can get a gig or find another band to play with to help me get a gig, and then frankly, some of it is as simple as do I have a friend in that town that I can a) hang out with and b) have a place to stay?

RA: Beyond community, you did mention some of those landmarks and things that you’ve been able to experience along with that. Were there specific things that you wanted to see, and also what were some of the highlights of it that maybe you weren’t anticipating that just kind of either blew you away?

Matty C: First of all, one of the real gifts of doing this is you get to spend a few hours at least, kind of exploring a city. If you’re somebody like me who’s pretty curious and a little adventurous, you can usually find something to keep you pretty occupied and excited. What I tend to do is either before I leave or while I’m on the road before I get to that town, I tend to think about what are the things I want to do, and what are the things I might be able to see going from place to place. On this particular trip, I had been to Manhattan a number of times, and I’d done kind of sort of like the big bucket list items, things like the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the MoMA, the Guggenheim, Central Park, Ellis Island, some of the big hitters.

I didn’t really have anything I felt like I had to do in the city, and I,had a couple friends, say that they had a really interesting experience at the Tenement Museum in the Lower East Side, which is a museum built out of an old tenement building that was used between the 1860s and the 1930s, and this building has been converted into a museum, and these rooms have been restored to look as they were used in the two rooms that I saw. One was around 1910, and the other one was around 1930. You have this amazing experience where you go through and you basically see how, in one case, nine members of a Lithuanian Jewish family that came in like 1901, how they lived in 1910 in the busiest neighborhood in the world in New York City. I could spend two hours doing this with my friend, and then as soon as we were done, we walked over to the site of where the Triangle Fire was, and for you and your listeners who don’t know, that was an industrial fire that happened in 1911, and like 126 young women and girls died, and it was one of the worst, still is one of the worst workplace place accidents in U.S. history, and many of the young women who died lived in these sort of tenement buildings, and they were living in pretty squalid conditions. So, you sort of get this really intense experience in the course of a couple hours. Then from there, we walked over to the Stonewall Inn where they had the riots that led to the first Pride movement. Then from there we went to the White Horse Tavern, which is the last place that Dylan Thomas was before he died, and that was also a drinking establishment for Kerouac and some of the beats, and a bunch of the artists that lived in the village in the 50s and 60s.

RA: Is there a rhythm to your days when you’re out on tour, because on top of all this stuff that you’re doing, you didn’t really skip a beat, at least on Substack?

Matty C: Basically, what I tried to do, at least on this particular trip, was I didn’t want to get too far behind on the tour diary because it’s impossible. I wouldn’t really be able to do anything else if I just got right up the next day and did the tour diary post from the show the night before. I need a little more time to sort of live with it to understand it. There’s a sweet spot where it’s long enough that you remember it pretty well, but you have some reflection, but it’s not so long that you’ve forgotten some of the detail, and so it’s kind of a little bit of a moving target. Once I got to a point where I had shorter commutes and had different kinds of days set up, I was able to pretty easily look at the week and go, “Okay, here’s where I can get some work done. Now, some of this is a little bit of a magic act in that all of the podcasts and all of the radio show stuff that I do for Substack was all front loaded before I left. That was just a ton of work before I left home. Literally for a week before I left, I prepped a (podcast) every day. I did seven of them before I left because I had two a week and I was gone for three weeks, and so a lot of that stuff it looked like I was getting a lot more done than I was actually getting done because I had already done it weekly.

RA: Having a chance to reflect on the tour at this point in your career, how do you measure it in terms of success?

Matty C: In terms of the connection at the show, I think a lot of it is that the more I do this, I understand what the rules are and what what I’m likely to get out of a particular scenario. I’m not somebody who’s going out and playing 18 theater dates or 18 dates where I’m playing dive bars or 18 dates where I’m doing house shows. They’re kind of a mishmash of different things. In this case, I played two or three breweries where I’m playing a two or three set night. I played some house shows. I played a number of standard music venues and bars with other bands from that town.

For example, at some of those shows where I’m playing like a conventional club show with another band, it’s as much about understanding what’s going on in that community in Durham or Kingston or Buffalo, and spending a little time talking to the people at the venue, the people in the other bands, the sound guy -- understanding what’s happening in those towns, and kind of where to pay attention and meeting some really cool people. I had like this amazing experience in Asheville where these two singer-songwriters who were probably 15 years younger than I am -- they were getting ready to go out on tour, and they had this three-piece backing band that backed both of them up. So one of them would get up and play, and then the other one would get up and play again -- it was the same three piece behind him. They packed this place in Asheville on a Sunday night and made me feel completely at home. I made money, I made a connection, I sold some merch, I definitely made some contacts. That’s sort of a perfect night. The night in Rockport (Maryland) is kind of a perfect night because for an hour at a house concert, it’s just me and people are wrapped. That’s what they’re there for. That’s a different experience than going and playing at a bar, where a bunch of those people are there to see the band that either played right before me or right after me.

So, it’s understanding that those two things aren’t going to give me the same reward. Sometimes it’s money, sometimes it’s connections. As far as money goes, basically I need to make some money because it’s my job. I have to make a little bit of a living. I try to set these up so that you’re gonna have Tuesday nights where nine people show up --like that’s just that’s just how it works. But you hope that Thursday, Friday and Saturday will kind of offset that to some degree. For me anyway, it’s about setting up some shows where I know that I’m likely to make some money, and then have some other places where I’m taking a little bit of a gamble. It’s more about things that aren’t monetary to try to make the tour work. I’m not a guy who’s in a position to be able to go like call somebody up in Omaha, Nebraska, and go, I’m pretty sure I can move 50 tickets on a Wednesday night. I’m not sure I can move five tickets in Omaha, Nebraska. I’ve never played there. So I have to do it a different way. Part of it is figuring out how do I make this sustainable? Sometimes that means there are nights where you make 100 bucks and you get some tips and you sell some merch and you make a little bit of money from the bar and you kind of eek it together and you go OK, I hope Friday night will offset that. It’s playing the long game. Can I make money off this three week run or that two week run? It’s not, ‘That night I made a bunch of money and that night I lost money.’ It’s all kind of part of a bigger thing.

RA: Can you describe being back to reality now? Is there sort of a letdown?

Matty C: There’s definitely a hangover. I had to give people an example of what my 20 days was like. I booked all the shows. I did all the promo stuff. I had a friend helping me send out some advanced stuff to press, but with the exception of that, I did all the promo stuff. I I did all the interaction and communication with the venues and other people in the bills. I set up my own routes. I booked my own hotels. I did all the driving. I did all the loading in and the loading out. I sold all the merch. I’m a one man band. So, most days for me would start early. On this particular tour, most days I’m getting up at six or seven, which is later than I usually get up at home. But I’m usually up pretty late, and so they’re 18 hour days, and they’re pretty full. That doesn’t mean that there’s not a lot of fun in them, but I didn’t take a lot of naps on this run. I took a handful, but they were like a half an hour here and an hour there in a car while I waited for a venue to open.

When I get home, for a couple days I was just kind of a little bit of a zombie and essentially I took about a week off. I’m going to go back to driving tomorrow, and part of that has been that I’ve had a ton of stuff to do to get caught up on the Substack, and part of it is that I just needed a little bit of a break because touring is amazing and really fun, but it’s really intense.

RA: Shifting gears a little bit, I wanted to ask you about your podcast series. You’ve had a bunch of really interesting guests like Marshall Crenshaw and John Darnielle. Are these individuals that you have previous experience playing with or meeting at different points in time, or are you cold emailing or reaching out to individuals that are just interesting to you?

Matty C: When I first started the pod three and a half years ago, it was largely me leaning on people that I had relationships with, and so it was other musicians from the Midwest that I knew, artists, podcasters, comedians, filmmakers -- folks that I kind of knew or knew somebody that knew them -- and gradually kind of built a thing. I think it took some time to sort of figure out what I was doing a little bit, and realized that essentially the conversation I’m having with people is tell me about your life making creative stuff, and tell me about the life that’s built for you. Along the way we learn about, OK I have this band or this book or this movie or this podcast; this thing that I do, and here’s how I got here. I did not know that when I talked to John Darnielle from The Mountain Goats that we were going to spend 15 minutes talking about Catholicism. Part of it is I want it to be open. I want it to be able to take a path I don’t predict. Once I got to a point where I kind of had my thing figured out a little bit, I just started cold emailing people, or just reaching out to people and messaging them, and saying, “I’ve got this thing. These are the conversations I want to have. Do you want to come on the show?” The more yeses I got, the easier I got to get more yeses. Now, it’s gotten to the point where I will talk to somebody, and then they will have a relationship with another writer or another filmmaker or another musician, and I will reach out and go, ‘Hey, I had this person on the show that you know. Would you be interested?’ Sometimes that is enough to get people to bite. I think a lot of people, once they find out that you’re not a hack, they want to talk.

RA: I know that you’ve told this story many times on Substack, but I wondered if you could describe your motivation for leaving behind your more stable career three years ago, and beyond that, what some of the biggest drawbacks to that are and the biggest payoffs have been for you since then?

Matty C: For 23 years, I sold caps and gowns in graduation to high school kids. I basically traveled to schools all over central and southwestern Michigan, and I would present and tell them how to celebrate their senior year and sell them things like class rings and diplomas and sweatshirts and T-shirts and all that kind of stuff. For quite a while of that run, I enjoyed it. I didn’t love it. It wasn’t my calling, but I was pretty good at it and I liked being around kids for the most part. If I was going to have a real job, I should have been a teacher. So this was a way for me to kind of engage with some of that and it was fun. In 2016, my company that I have had a sales relationship with was bought out by Bain Capital, and they immediately started making decisions like laying off staff, closing factories, trying to trim the fat and in doing that, they took a very seasonal focused business and put it at risk because the window for delivery is so narrow. Long story short, they made a bunch of really awful decisions and in 2016, they had a delivery season that nearly ruined my entire territory. I lost like 40% of my business, and then I rallied and I kind of built some of it back over time. And then COVID happened in 2020, and they made another series of really bad decisions in 2021 and 2022, at which point I just had to go, I couldn’t do this anymore. I was literally feeling sick, and it was making me mentally unwell, and I was really depressed, and I couldn’t sleep. There were a million things wrong.

Eventually, I just went to my wife and I said, “Listen, I can’t do this anymore, the writing is on the wall that this is not a sustainable business anymore, and these people don’t know what they’re doing. I need to get out.” So, I made arrangements to leave in the summer of 2023, and it was an enormous leap, and it’s still a difficult thing to deal with every day, logistically speaking, because I wasn’t making great money, but I was making enough money. I knew money was going to be there on the first and the 15th, and all my bills were going to be paid, and I didn’t have to worry about what went in the grocery cart and all my stuff was going to get paid on time. Then I went to this world where I had to run out and chase it and grab it, and every day was a hustle, and that was a real adjustment for me, and to a certain extent it still is. The only drawback is I don’t have that money. That’s the only drawback. If we really think about it from a grand scheme, that in and of itself, with nothing else, is not a life. That’s survival. So, looking back on it, I realize I should have left long before I left. I think losing my dad in 2020 not because of COVID, but just coincidentally at the same time, and then dealing with COVID, dealing with all these things in my business; my daughter moved home from out west after a really difficult end to a relationship. It was just really awful time. I think that gave me the excuse to rip the bandaid off, but I think I should have done it years before.

RA: I wanted to ask you about your driving rideshare experience as well, because I also drove Uber for about a year a half. What aspects of it do you enjoy, or is it hard to motivate yourself?

Matty C: I always want to be doing creative work. That said, there are a number of things about driving rideshare that I really enjoy. One of the things that’s been really fun for me is I live in a university town. I live near East Lansing, Michigan, and right now we’ve got all these kids moving back, and I will go out tomorrow, and there will be all these bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, 18 and 19-year-olds who just showed up and are on their own for the first time ever. On the one hand, that can be a little annoying having a community that’s completely inundated with a bunch of children. On the other hand, it’s really kind of lovely and charming. It’s really kind of nice because you get to see these people at the beginning of this new grand adventure, and as much as they think they know everything, and it’s easy to shit on teenagers and say, “Oh, they think they’ve got it all figured out.” They really don’t, and they really don’t think that they do. Sometimes they pretend because they think they’re supposed to pretend. But what’s really interesting, I think, specifically in being around these kids, is they haven’t become jaded and cynical like the people that I spend my time with all day. I don’t mean that I spend my time around like hardened people, but lthere’s something about like once you hit middle age, there’s a reality that sets in, and there’s a certain amount of cynicism that creeps into your life, and these kids are still just fucking filled with hope and that’s really endearing.

One of the best parts about my old job that I got was to be around those people and get some of that energy. I still get that from Uber and from Lyft. I also have some of the most amazing conversations with immigrants. It’s unreal. Many of these people come here, don’t have enough money for a car. They don’t know how to drive. So, they ride the bus and they take Uber and left. You find out all of these stories about people who came here from halfway across the world, often alone at very young ages, doing incredibly brave things. These people are just in my car driving around Lansing, Michigan, which means those stories are everywhere. I sort of think if you get out there and you get in the world and you have these conversations with people, your whole attitude about everything in life will soften, and it’s it’s part of the reason that I so wish that the people that I know in my life who are I’m trying to be diplomatic. The people in my life who are just blindly following fascism, and I look at them and I go, you know, you might be less afraid if you went to a local rock show, or a poetry reading, or an art gallery opening, because you might see that there are a bunch of really amazing people out there. Maybe you’re just spending time with the wrong people. I’m kind of reminded when I get into my car that most people are really great and I think it’s really easy to lose sight of that. I think it’s really easy to get negative and jaded about it, but at the same time, I sort of feel like if you’re if the world around you is not what you want it to be, who are you waiting for to fix it but yourself?

RA: You often mention the motivation for making that transition in your career was so you could do the stuff that’s actually important. Is that an attitude or perspective that came with time, And I also wondered if you feel like it’s been worth it?

Matty C: The answer to the last question is yes. It has been worth it. It has been harder than I thought it was going to be. It has been more challenging, both financially and emotionally. I had to reckon with some things about my ego in leaving my job that I didn’t realize I was going to have to reckon with. I was never somebody who broadcast myself as being the person who was defined by what they did from eight to five every day, but at the same time, I felt like I lost,, by not having a corporate job, all of a sudden, there was a little sense of shame that came with that. There was a sense of like, what What are you doing at 50 or 51, and you’re starting over? It wasn’t so much that I needed to explain it to me, but I started to feel sheepish about explaining it to others. I think over time, I really grew into the confidence of the idea of leaving to do the work that really mattered and was really important was kind of a leap of faith. It was sort of like I don’t know what else to do. I didn’t want to turn around and get another job that was just soul sucking, and made enough money, but gave me no sense of life. I wanted something that was going to feel like my days were being filled with purpose and intention, and I still struggle with that. But it’s very hard not to find purpose every day when you’re on the road, and the purpose happens at 7o’clock at night on a stage in front of people.

So, doing this work, having conversations that air every Monday and every Friday, doing the radio show, doing the tour dates, being able to sort of make all of that stuff a a reality, and then and then have a schedule where there are actually people out there who are expecting to hear about it is pretty remarkable. I don’t know that I really knew that that was even truly possible until I just did it. I have a friend who, when I first started, she was on the show and she said, “Matt, I’m going to give you a piece of advice from the great Arthur Ashe. ‘Don’t make it perfect. Just make it.’

I think if there’s one thing I’ve learned from doing this for three and a half years, it’s that your talent and your taste will help you, and if you need to do whatever the creative thing is that you’re doing, if you’re really paying attention to it, you’ll get better. Your talent and your taste will start to catch up with each other, and you’ll start to realize I can do some of the things that I didn’t used to be able to do that I want to accomplish now, and that may be you put yourself in a different room, and now you get permission. It may be that you didn’t know you could write this way, or make a video, or play a guitar, and you sort of teach yourself those things, and then they become things that you know how to do, not things that you’re learning how to do. I think if we’re being intentional, and if we’re really paying attention to our craft, we’re sort of all the time kind of figuring out how can I do this better, right? Right now in this moment, not in some grand scheme, but like what could I do that would make 1% improvement and kind of bringing that idea to everything that I do. So that it’s not “I have to turn this in six months into something genius.” It’s just sort of always evolving, and I hope it’s always progressing in the right direction.

Momo Boyd might have moved from Detroit to New York at a young age, but the foundation of her ambition to be a singer was enough for her to call her debut solo album Miss Michigan.

On the second show of her first tour as a solo artist, the versatile and charismatic Boyd received the homecoming welcome of a pageant queen during a sentimental and celebratory show this past weekend at El Club in Detroit.

Boyd, who moved to New York at age 5, said even if she doesn’t have vivid memories of her earliest years in Michigan, the ones she does hold are powerful and subconscious.

“They have shaped me in ways I can’t even describe to you,” Boyd said. “The reason that I am such a big dreamer and such a go-getter is because I was born here. That is why I named my project Miss Michigan -- it all comes back to Michigan. It all comes back to the little girl I was that planted the seed to what I am today.”

Boyd’s profile has risen behind the buzz of Miss Michigan, building off the success of her sibling band Infinity Song. Her musical journey coincided with her family’s move to New York City in 2006, with she and her three siblings, Abraham, Angel and Israel making music inspired by the classical, gospel and jazz influences her father, John, had instilled in them like Pat Metheny, Marvin Gaye and The Winans Family.

Described as “soft rock,” Infinity Song channels some of the elements Boyd leans on as a solo performer, anchored by her deep, powerful voice. It was one of many signatures of Infinity Song that grabbed the attention of JAY-Z after the quartet regularly performed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Times Square and their eventual home base of Bethesda Fountain in Central Park. The group was signed to Roc Nation in 2016, later releasing their debut album Mad Love in 2020. They, too, dropped a self-titled album in 2026, just as impressive as Miss Michigan, that showcases the entirety of this family’s talents.

Boyd’s father and manager, John (founder of the Boys & Girls Choirs of Detroit) spoke about Momo’s specific gifts as a singer ahead of the show. Give either one of these projects a listen and you can understand why he’s a proud Dad.

“They had something where they were interviewing her and asking her what she wanted to do when she got older and she was adamant she wanted to be a singer,” John said. “The Lord has brought that to pass.”

Boyd’s latest chapter is a similarly pop-forward affair, even if it strays into confessional singer/songwriter territory on Miss Michigan, a varied and excellent showcase of her variety of talents. When MusicStacker John Wright shared the kiss off single Oops earlier this year, I was immediately drawn to the catchy melody Boyd delivered with ease, crowning it Michigan’s Song of the Summer. After an initial listen, though, more songs like Cold Hands immediately stood out for their quiet depth after a Lana Del Ray-esque orchestral swell, signaling there was more going on with Boyd’s music than conventional pop song structures.

Her homecoming show elevated those songs to a new level by putting Boyd’s syrupy voice front and center. Boyd’s choice of covers, including Prince’s The Beautiful Ones and Fleetwood Mac’s Dreams, were a testament to that realization. Delivered with jaw-dropping range, you sort of get lost in whatever she’s singing.

What became apparent by Boyd’s performance, though, was the realization that she has an audience of adorers who feel the same way. Many in attendance were decked in tiaras, later turning the stage into a makeshift pageant, capped off with an adorable 3-year-old being crowned the night’s Miss Michigan.

Even if she has dreams of occupying bigger stages in the future, Boyd seemed captivated by an audience who were caught up in her captivating presence. As she points out on Cold Hands, Boyd is simply waiting for the other shoe to drop.

“I truly feel like my next era is going to be the one,” she said. “It’s already a big moment. This is already plenty successful, but I really have a feeling the next era I put out some music is going to be the big one.

“When I see you guys singing back the words so passionately, I’m looking around the room and I’m like ‘Oh my gosh, they know the songs.’ Singing them is never going to stop blowing my mind with the power of vulnerability and honesty and what human emotion can do. It’s something AI can never recreate.”

Amen to that.

The big dreams Boyd alluded to seem inevitable to come true. She debuted two new songs on stage that veer into the territory of Oops, including the sweeping Heartbreak Baby and Uh Oh, the self-described cousin of the aforementioned breakthrough single. Although Uh Oh was delivered somewhat awkwardly behind a vocal-included backing track, it’s apparent this is only the beginning for Boyd.

The secret sauce for Boyd might be the delicate mix of lyrics that call attention to the perception of being saddled with big expectations and living up to the “princess” persona she’s crafted on songs like Big Country and She’s A Sweetheart, where she counters this billing with lyrics like “This seems to be a trend/Everybody’s got an idea of what I’m supposed to be.”

Even if the expectations she and others have put on Boyd seem difficult to live up to, it’s all comes with the territory of being Miss Michigan.

“I have dreamt of doing only this my entire life,” Boyd told the audience. “It was only this - it was only Plan A, it was never Plan B. I just hope that everybody was inspired and walks away believing in themselves.”

There was some unfinished business pertaining to Big Thief going into the band’s show at the Masonic Temple in Detroit this past week.

I don’t usually go into concerts with a “score to settle.” The stakes are usually never high. But the last time I saw Big Thief perform, it resulted in one of the most divided opinions about a performance that I had ever experienced.

Frankly, I loved them and needed little convincing of the band’s status as a force to be reckoned with in the world of indie rock or even music in general. I, however, was alone among my friends in attendance in holding this opinion after Big Thief headlined a Saturday evening at the Pitchfork Music Festival in Chicago back in 2021.

Looking back at the setlist for this particular performance, I’m kind of dumbfounded by how this could be the case. Delivering many of the now-legendary songs from what is arguably the band’s high water mark to date, the landmark double album Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You, it just doesn’t make sense on paper. Change. Certainty. Spud Infinity. Simulation Swarm. Fans of the band would be thrilled to have those songs populate a setlist today.

Beyond that, the band delivered plenty of other songs that now qualify as greatest hits material: Mary, Shark Smile, Masterpiece, Forgotten Eyes and Not. Literally all of these songs are revered as classics in the world of indie rock and among the fanbase and those who follow rock music.

The critiques were real, though, and I sort of get them in retrospect. The band started off quiet. Real quiet. These songs were also pretty unfamiliar to most in attendance, as the album came out approximately eight months later.

For many, starting off on a slow burn is a no-no, particularly when you’re headlining a festival where you’re trying to win people over. To Big Thief’s credit, it seems like they knew these songs were pretty special and they were confident in giving the audience what they felt they needed, not wanted at the time. I don’t know how the festival audience as a whole felt about the show, but looking back, it stands out as one of those “can you believe it” type of shows to be a part of in getting a sneak peak into a band that was clearly at the top of its game.

There were other reservations my friends shared with me. The sound was terrible, for one. On the whole, I don’t agree with this take, but there was a particular moment from that show that still sticks out like a sore thumb. After spending the set building up steam, late set stunner Not had some issues with the sound cutting out that put a black mark on a positively hair-raising performance of what is indisputably the band’s biggest rocker. No biggie, I thought. It’s not like this was their issue. And the song still rocked. I still feel like I’m on the right side of history.

All of that ridiculous contextual buildup was on my mind heading into the band’s equally subdued performance at the Masonic Temple. So, no, I don’t think any scores were settled with this performance. I thoroughly enjoyed the show, even if the setlist somehow felt much more unfamiliar to me this time around.

Leaning heavily on material from the band’s 2025 album Double Infinity, the only thing that is clear to me is that Big Thief treats all of its growing catalog like its children. There’s no playing favorites -- they’re all favorites. Lead singer/frontwoman Adrienne Lenker is the truly rare modern day rock star (do we still have those?) who couldn’t care less about how her band’s catalog is perceived.

First and foremost, Lenker is the complete package and this performance cemented that status for me. I don’t think there’s a more talented songwriter making music today and her toolbelt is particularly stacked. She can really belt out a tune or make you shake your head with tender and often thought provoking lyrics. When she needs to jam for the crowd to scratch that particular itch, she happily obliges, delivering a version of Not that brought down the house -- without any technical difficulties. She played new material (Christmas Day, Mr. Man) and old (Shark Smile, Contact). Solo material (Terminal Paradise, Bright Future) and the hits (Spud Infinity, Vampire Empire). She deferred to lead guitarist Buck Meek for a late set highlight from his acoustic-ified version of Gasoline from his 2026 album The Mirror.

Perhaps the most refreshing part of the band’s set is that they still appear to truly enjoy being part of this band and in each other’s company. Lenker used one particular segue during the set to inform the audience that the band isn’t using setlists anymore, instead relying on what she described as “telephone” to inform each other about what song was coming up next. During that moment, she provided three examples of some of the band’s biggest songs, gauging audience reaction for it to “choose” the next song based on its response to all of the tunes she named off (Dragon New Warm Mountain’s Change was the winner).

The band came back for an encore of their Double Infinity standout track, Incomprehensible, the latest instant classic to add to their growing rolodex of classics, with the audience singing along with every word. Even if their latest album was seen as a tad underwhelming compared to their flawless discography to date, the crowd’s devotion to this tune proved they’re showing no signs of slowing down.

So, whatever unfinished business remained about whether the band could bring it live feels sort of trivial after watching them a second time, even if the set lacked some of the “rock out” punch some might crave or expect from a big time rock band. It’s better than that, though, not relying on the tropes of a traditional rock and roll setlist. As their signature song Spud Infinity alludes to, it’s music capable of freeing the celestial body.

Pavement is a jam band.

That’s both a declaratory statement of fact at this point and a response I shouted to my friend Kyle as the band ripped through an expressive version of The Hexx, one of their tastiest jam tracks from their final album Terror Twilight.

Kyle had raised the question of whether they had become or always were a jam band leading up to seeing them live recently at The Salt Shed in Chicago -- our second time seeing the kings of ‘90s indie rock since they had reunited as a touring legacy act.

I guess that’s the big, bold takeaway from the band’s live show since they started stringing together tours four years ago. I apologize if I’m not covering new ground here. I googled the heck out of “is Pavement a jam band?” and nobody had written anything that would count as a definitive piece on it.

Maybe it’s more in vogue to be labeled as a jam band since a wide range of acts like Goose, Billy Strings and even Sturgill Simpson have become some of the most palatable sources of extended jams in “rock music” of this era, giving bands like Pavement a pass to let loose a bit more in their latest incarnation. With classic jam bands like The Grateful Dead now being seen in a much more favorable light these days, it’s an argument worth reconsidering (side note: I’m now regretting not calling Pavement the Greatest American Band, as inspired by this semi-recent Michael Azerrad Substack post).

It’s gratifying to reconsider the legacy and scope of a band I’ve loved for so long. While I was definitely too young and clueless to know or appreciate Pavement in their original, flawless run during the early-to-mid-’90s, they were without question the most important “gateway” band for me during my college years in the early 2000s. Away from home for the first time and with access to the greatest tool of that generation -- the all important CABLE INTERNET -- I sifted through poorly-labeled mp3s of some of the band’s best known tracks, making it my mission to paste together their critically acclaimed album Slanted And Enchanted.

I was blown away by the audacity of a (now deleted) perfect 10 Pitchfork review of the re-release of that album from 2003, a hand-written, heart-on-the-sleeve ode to what the band had meant to reviewer Chris Ott. It was one of the first pieces of music journalism that truly spoke to me and I knew I needed to hear it. With a superior internet connection, I had a new favorite band I was not afraid to tell everyone in my apartment complex about, carefully moving away from the pop punk bands like New Found Glory, Alkaline Trio and Blink-182 I had unabashedly blasted at communal gatherings. As each studio album got a generous re-release, packaged with all of the b-sides and outtake goodies that stand on nearly equal footing as the album cuts, my appreciation for them only deepened.

While many didn’t “get it,” I felt like I was in on a secret for the first time as a music listener. They were less popular than Nirvana or everyone’s favorite nature kids The Smashing Pumpkins, but I still saw the genius of their The Fall meets The Velvet Underground DIY recording approach paired with silly songs that often meant everything and nothing, all at once. They could be hilarious on songs like Cut Your Hair, hit you over the head with some of the most tender insights about life on ballads like Here, or just get lost in the spacey Grounded. Over the next 20 years or so, my opinion of them didn’t budge. Pavement was perfect in my mind. Five flawless studio albums and a truckload of also brilliant b-sides and outtakes set it in stone. They did their thing, got out before they got stale and called it a day. They could do no wrong in my mind.

That’s why seeing them during their reunion renaissance has been so important to me, adding another dimension to their greatness. During their show in 2022 at the Masonic Temple in Detroit, it was apparent they were more than happy to jazz up scratchy, rough songs like Trigger Cut (THE greatest Pavement song) and Box Elder (the most underrated Pavement song), showcasing not only the guitar noodling prowess of frontman Stephen Malkmus, but the contributions of all of the band’s members. While Malkmus has always been the clear selling point to the masses, their live performances have been careful to give each of the members their moment, showcasing their collective sense of humor, sincerity and contributions to the band’s sound and catalog.

No song from their latest tour displayed the band’s willingness to let loose more than Stairway to Heaven. Yes, that Stairway to Heaven. And yes, it sounds exactly like what you’d expect Pavement’s version of Led Zeppelin’s criminally overplayed classic rock radio epic would sound like. Meandering and heartfelt with every note, Stairway to Heaven fit snugly toward the back end of the band’s set at The Salt Shed, and they didn’t look back. If you are able to catch them on this tour, this will be a highlight. The crappy 20 second clip I took above doesn’t do it any justice. Sorry dude, jams just aren’t meant to be documented.

Which reminds me, I’ve got a live show to review here. First, if you’re from the Midwest and haven’t been able to catch a show at The Salt Shed, you should change that. This was my third time seeing a show there, but it was the first one set in the venue’s outdoor stage. While the venue’s friendly indoor confines are second to none in terms of stage setting, sound and convenience of food and beverages, its equally great outdoors. Throw in the whole Chicago in the summer time thing with the city’s skyline as a backdrop and it should make sense why this place has gotten such a positive buzz since its opening three years ago.

Outside of Stairway to Heaven -- a new addition to the band’s latest tour -- Pavement’s set didn’t veer into any wild new territory from what they’ve been playing during their reunion shows. All of the “hits” like Summer Babe, Gold Soundz, Spit on a Stranger and the band’s resurgent TikTok jam Harness Your Hopes were there. It was how they played them that made the biggest impact.

If I didn’t love virtually every song the band has written, I would be tempted to label the early portion of their set as a bit uninspired. Gold Soundz, unquestionably one of the best songs of the ‘90s, in particular, felt a bit mailed in. But it sort of made sense in the context of my point about them being a jam band now. The band seemed like it was giving the audience what they thought it wanted early on so it could truly flex its muscles by losing themselves on the rangier cuts like Stop Breathin, AT&T, Elevate Me Later, Embassy Row and The Hexx. Even shorter, tossed-off cuts like Slanted and Enchanted’s Zurich is Stained and Watery, Domestic EP deep cut Lions (Linden) were delivered with a renewed sense of purpose and the band’s willingness to veer from their traditional structures to show their musical dexterity.

Beyond Pavement, there’s something undeniably special about experiencing live music and just Chicago in general, in the summer. Much of my late 20s and 30s were spent basking in the impossibly perfect summer sun at the Pitchfork Music Festival with many of the same folks I took this show in with (for more on them, check out this Nine Inch Nails live review). The day after the show, we spent the day bumming around in the countless oddball shops in Logan Square and eating some of the best food I’ve had in a while at Longman & Eagle and Void (try the lasagna, y’all). We capped off the trip by blowing off any remaining steam we had left at a neighborhood house music club that reminded me why I love being in this city so much through the years. Chicago at night at its finest.

It’s a bit of an awkward proposition for Pavement fans to call for an encore. The band’s fans are notoriously aloof and tough to impress on the outside, even if they’re screaming for more songs within. After some mild prodding for a return to the stage, including my wife’s endearing scream for some Silver Jews songs, the band came back for two more: The meta-aware, radio friendly Stereo and Here -- maybe Malkmus’ finest moment as a lyricist. There were moments throughout the night where some of the band’s more lowkey numbers like Range Life and We Dance choked me up with a sense of melancholy as I felt the weight of the words I had memorized and had been singing along to without thinking over the past 20-plus years.

“I guess, a guess is the best I’ll do,” Malkmus sang, closing out the evening with trademark tenderness and ambiguity. It might not have been a drawn out jam that was the highlight of the evening, but it got me thinking. Chicago in the summer with some of the best people I know and the best indie jam band of all time. I’m probably not going to do better than that.

At one point in time, Sleep Tight Tiger’s band bio noted the Ypsilanti quartet was “serious about having fun.”

Spend any amount of time with their excellent new EP Plum Something and you’ll quickly realize they aren’t joking.

Lighthearted, breezy and carefully considered, the band’s sound creates a vibe that they want the listener to have as much fun as they’re having, even if their complex vocal harmonies and grab bag of influences insist they take this whole band thing as seriously as their deep allegiances to each other.

“Having fun isn’t just our motto, it is truly a lifestyle,” guitarist/vocalist Ruby Howard said. “Sometimes practices run long because we are too busy building multi-layered bits and musical comedy routines, and gigs are usually punctuated by trips to the Dairy Queen because ice cream with friends makes any experience sweeter.”

First crossing paths as student DJs at the University of Michigan’s freeform radio station WCBN, Sleep Tight Tiger were first known as The Goopies, jamming together under the pretenses that the band had a rapid expiration date. They threw a single show in the winter of 2024, agreeing that the band was supposed to break up. But the foursome of Howard, Evan Beane (guitar, vocals), Laura Topf (bass, vocals) and Steve Poeschel (drums, vocals) determined there was more fun to be had under their new name of Sleep Tight Tiger.

Now fully on board as a band, Sleep Tight Tiger have decided to let the good times continue to roll with a move to Chicago, recently playing their final show as a Michigan band at Ypsilanti’s Regal Beagle Lounge.

Regardless of where they call home, the band have created a wonderful mix of twee pop, doo-wop and indie rock in their sound that will feel at home in any city. Sleep Tight Tiger recently took some time to talk about their breakthrough EP, their recent tour dates with Horsegirl and why enjoying each other’s company as a band is non-negotiable.

Radio Amor: First and most important question: Are all of the members of Sleep Tight Tiger from Ypsilanti? How did you all first cross paths?

Ruby Howard: We are not! We all met at the freeform radio station at University of Michigan, WCBN, as student DJs. We moved to Ypsi after graduating and have absolutely loved it.

Evan Beane: My first interaction with the student radio station was through Ruby who gave me a walk through tour during WCBN’s open house. Laura and Steve were in a punk band around campus that I was a huge fan of. When we realized that we all played instruments and had similar music interests, forming a project just made so much sense to us.

RA: I wondered if you could give me a little history on the band’s evolution from The Goopies to Sleep Tight Tiger; why you decided to change up the name and if that change was intended to signal a new chapter for the band?

RH: We started jamming together under the pretenses that our band had a rapid expiration date, so we threw a single show before the band was supposed to “break up” in the winter of 2024 as The Goopies (based on The Doopees), playing mostly covers and one original that is lost to the annals of time. We all somehow ended up back in the Ann Arbor/Ypsi area and decided that the dream didn’t have to die, and we started writing some songs and playing some shows. When we got the opportunity to record our songs we started thinking harder about our name and decided that then was the time to ever change it.

EB: I think it was nice having a name change to differentiate ourselves from our college band days. Even just in the short time span of graduating and being out of college, the project had changed so much. We had become way more deliberate with our style and approach to songwriting, so it was nice feeling that we could, in a way, start over and come right out the gate with a release we were all really proud of!

RA: One of the defining elements of the band’s sound are the layered, semi-differentiated vocals and the fact that all of your members provide them. Can you give me some insight into how you determine how to incorporate vocals into your songs and who takes the lead on a given track?

Laura Topf: Just by being in a band together, we’ve gotten so close, but I really enjoy the relational aspect of singing harmonies -- it’s like a running three-legged race. We sing together, mostly because it’s fun, and I like to think we are good at it!

Since all of the songs are pretty collaborative, everyone is trying out melody lines together and usually it’s pretty easy to tell whose voice fits a song best.

EB: Most of the songs on Plum Something were written together, but we all definitely contributed rough ideas individually that would often evolve into a song over time. A lot of the time, it was dependent on who we would write with, too. Skate was written while Steve, Laura and I were hanging out. Jeannie was written by Ruby, Laura, and I while we were hanging out. In that sense, I think the very open collaboration style that we employ allows people to take the reins on songs that they felt most comfortable with singing. We also just love songs that have a lot of harmonies, so if one of us weren’t initially singing on it, we would just build on top of it.

RA: Along those lines, does the band have a designated primary songwriter or do different members bring the basic framework for songs to the table for you to work on?

Steve Poeschel: We hire a ghost writer for all of our songs, mainly using services like Craigslist and Fiver. Usually it starts with one of us having some baseline idea of a vocal melody, chord progression, or lyrical theme. I think they get together and build it up a bit into at least a quick little demo. Then when the three string players have something, they’ll play it for me, I come up with some rough drum parts, and they sort of work me through what they were thinking. That’s kind of the average process, but some songs have different stages of completion or direction from the members. We’re actually working on a song now that I brought to the table so it’s very collaborative!

RA: I detect some elements of twee, doo-wop and indie rock in the band’s sound formula. Has your sound evolved since the band’s origins, or was it always your intention to incorporate elements of different styles of music into your sound?

SP: I feel like our sound might’ve gotten a bit “cleaner”(?) since we started. I’m not too sure how to explain it, but I recall our first show having a grungier feel. The covers we played were a bit grittier and now we have a lot of songs about childlike whimsy themes, you know learning to tie your shoes and painting with your friends and whatnot. It always carried those underlying genre themes though, that shows up a lot and I think we hope to experiment more by incorporating different sounds and styles. I always half-jokingly suggest we make capricious genre jumps like doing a country album or a disco EP or other such frivolous endeavors, but I’m a Ween fan so it’s understandable.

EB: Incorporating different styles into our music just happened naturally. While we do have a lot of overlap in music we like, we all have enough distinct interests that we’ll branch out when contributing ideas. The range of sound in Plum Something comes from us trial running a lot of different genres we like. It’s these moments of experimentation that I love the most. Tiny Poem really came together when Steve suggested we do a hardcore breakdown in the middle of it. That being said, I think for how we currently write, we’re definitely working off of a more narrow range of influences that sounds more coherent, but I think that feeling of experimentation is still present.

RA: There’s an apparent sweetness to the disposition of your songs, but you don’t seem to be afraid to incorporate segues of scarier vocal moments and dissonance. Is it your intention to fuse these opposing sounds into your songs from time to time?

LT: Most definitely. I feel like the sweetness is mainly a reflection of overall how we function and the dynamic of the group – we’re all here to have a good time and making happy music makes us (or at least) me feel happier in some hard times. Figuring out how to add in the noise and the dissonance gives us a fun challenge, and makes me feel like our whole body of work is more representative of who we are.

Adding the bitter to the sweet almost makes it more palatable. I’ve often been made to feel that the only important art is the kind that is hard to swallow, so it feels like incorporating the two shows that we aren’t staying where it’s comfortable, but those purely happy songs can be just as impactful.

RH: We are all fans of such wide-ranging genres of music, and it feels more exciting to me personally to be able to dip into louder, harsher, more experimental territory while still making sugary-sweet pop songs.

SP: Sometimes adding those bombastic parts are just fun ways to spice up songs as well. It’s fun to play loud and hard.

RA: Can you take me through the recording of Plum Something: How it was recorded, where and over what period of time? Were you happy with the final output?

SP: We banged out the album over a full day at our friend Evan Courtney’s house. It sort of came together serendipitously, as Evan sought recording/mixing practice and we had a collection of tunes we wanted recorded. During a chilly November Saturday we hunkered down in his makeshift studio in his Detroit basement and hammered out our instrumentals. I think most were done in about five takes. It was tough and we were feeling it towards the end, but we were all pretty pleased with how we did.

EB: I really enjoy the final output of Plum Something. I’ve always loved the unpolished sound of self-released DIY albums, so it was fun recording it in such a short period of time because it felt like we were essentially making a live album. It was nice we got to utilize a lot of really nice recording equipment though, because the high fidelity sound with very quickly tracked group takes creates a really fun sonic concoction. The instrumentals were all tracked together which I think is what carried the heart of these songs, since we love playing shows, it harnesses those emotions a lot more succinctly than if we tracked everything piece-by-piece.

RA: A highlight of the record for me is the lead track, Skate. It feels very fully realized, bringing all of the members of the band and your sound into the mix. Can you give some background on who came up with the song? It’s also obviously indebted to this sort of carefree, summer-esque vibe. Did you set out to create a song that evoked this feeling?

LT: If I remember correctly, the song started with Evan’s guitar riff, in Steve’s basement. From there, Steve and Evan came up with a lot of the arrangement, and the three of us worked out a chorus super quickly. It was one of those songs that you write in a single session. I was in a rough patch, and was really wishing for the fun and free summer you see in the movies. The time writing the lyrics with the boys and having fun with them, reminiscing on the memories we wrote “Skate” about, is what I think made the song salient to others.

EB: The creation of Skate came at a very polarizing time in my life. We were all living in Ann Arbor over the summer. I had just graduated and was miserable and was feeling very uncertain about my overall future. It was fun just meeting up with everyone and writing a song with no expectations or stakes, because it resulted in a collective release of emotions that were so earnest. All of these emotions were distilled in our dream scenario of a perfect summer day: we all get to just hang out and go roller skating. I think this song was a great catalyst for the realization that you don’t have to have your future figured out, and that we can all figure it out together.

SP: When we wrote Skate I was on top of the world. Nothing could get me down and I was feeling fantastic. Good song, too.

RA: You recently had the opportunity to open some shows for Horsegirl. How did that opportunity come about and what was that experience like?

RH: We got to chat with Horsegirl when they came to the Big Pop Show music festival in Durham, NC in March of this year, which we had the honor of playing at. We yapped their ears off about Detroit and told them how excited we were to see them play in Ferndale in June and they kindly told us they would get us into the show for free. A few weeks later I got a text from Gigi asking if we would be interested in joining the bill as co-openers with Nine Perfect Lives, to which we very very emphatically said yes! It was easily the most nerves-inducing show I’ve ever played in my life, and it was an absolutely magical experience. Lots of our friends and family came out and filled up the first row of the audience which made the show 100% more fun and easy.

EB: It was incredibly surreal for me. I probably wouldn’t be making the music I do if it wasn’t for Horsegirl. I remember hanging out in Wazoo Records in Ann Arbor and randomly coming across Versions of Modern Performance. I bought it just off the cover alone, and after hearing Anti-Glory, I changed up my entire playing style. Having been so enamored with the youth underground scenes happening in Chicago and New York for the past few years, it’s nice now feeling like we have a place in it. I was simultaneously excited and terrified to be on stage playing music that I feel proud of, with one of my biggest musical inspirations headlining.

SP: It was pretty interesting for me because I wasn’t all too familiar with their music, unlike the rest of the band who’s super into them. With that degree of separation, I recall explaining to them concepts of OSHA regulations and asking them what games they had on their Nintendo Switch. I hope they didn’t think I was weird…

Aside from that, I found it motivating to be playing for a crowd that didn’t solely consist of people that came to see us. We had to sort of prove ourselves to folks that came out for a bigger act, it felt legit.

RA: In your band bio, you mention being serious about having fun. Is that the approach you take to your endeavors -- to keep things light and fun? Is that your approach to practices/rehearsals?

EB: Because the formation of STT was rooted in just wanting to have fun, I feel like it’s just a natural inclination for us to goof off and have fun. I’m very grateful that we started out as friends before bandmates, because friendship is always at the forefront of everything we do. It helps me feel open to being vulnerable and to take more risks in our creative endeavors because we all know each other so well. I really like all hanging out together and feeling like we’re a group of wily juvenile delinquents causing mischief. It always intrigues me to think how people perceive our silliness from the outside. We’ve definitely scared a lot of people with our endless barrage of inside jokes and new gags, but we can’t help it.

SP: I remember signing a waiver to ensure maximum fun-levels at all times . Additionally, on top of practice we have biweekly meetings to discuss how we can corner the fun market and boost our fun output. Furthermore, the silly meter is commonly employed to track monthly trends amongst band members. Moreover, the Goof-O-Tron 3,000 is regularly serviced and is required to be switched on when two or more of us are together. Also,…………

RA: What’s on the horizon for the band for the rest of 2026 and beyond? More shows?

LT: We are actually moving to Chicago at the beginning of August. We are excited for the new beginning and to join so many lovely bands we’ve had the privilege of playing with on tour or as they stop through Michigan. We are touring in September with the band Time Thief (playing in Detroit on 9/22), and have some awesome songs that we’ve been working on, too!

EB: I’m excited for our move to Chicago! We’ll all be living together, so I’m excited about the prospect of getting to work on music more frequently and in such a tight knit way. We’ve made a lot of great friendships with other bands and artists there over the years, so hopefully some great collaborations and lineups will be happening.

Last year, I admittedly attended GIG - The Art of Michigan Music for selfish reasons.

Run by two of my favorite Substackers, Chuck and Brenda Marshall, GIG celebrates the photos, posters and graphic designs of Michigan artists, but it also offers people like me a chance to network and seek out story ideas from other people in the music industry who aren’t making the actual music.

In addition to featuring a gallery of photos and posters of 20 Michigan music photographers and graphic artists, GIG hosts educational sessions and artist roundtables that are helpful to artists. This year, they’ve added a panel discussion on the importance of artists having a web presence outside of social media and a talk on mental health and suicide prevention.

After two years in Jackson, GIG is moving to Chelsea as part of its annual Sounds & Sights festival on July 24 and 25. Whether you want to check out the work of some pretty great photographers and graphic artists or are seeking networking opportunities with others in the music industry, I would highly recommend checking it out. There also will be records for sale, including some from local labels like Quarantine Records.

First curating “GIG - The Art of Michigan Music” 10 years ago as an exhibit showcasing the work of Michigan music photographers and artists at the Ann Arbor Art Center, Chuck Marshall started the event back up three years ago when folks from Manchester Underground encouraged him to bring it back during his Fans With Bands podcast.

This year’s festival features the work of some great photographers I’ve spoken to for this blog, including Doug Coombe, Cidney Bundon and Carbon Decoy drummer/frontman Casey Rowe.

I couldn’t be more proud of what Chuck and Brenda have built off of their excellent Life in Michigan blog, which has expanded into a couple of podcasts, this festival and a very helpful calendar of events of literally everything that is going on in Michigan. With GIG, they’ve been able to create and maintain an experience that is valuable for so many people in an industry where there isn’t always a huge support system.

I’ve always felt like if you truly love music, you should find a way to give something back to it, big or small. I love writing about artists from Michigan because it’s interesting, fulfilling and it helps me connect with the artists who are making the music I love. It also feels like there aren’t a ton of ways for those artists to get the word out about the great music they’re making and hope I’ve been able to help them promote who they are in some small way.

GIG is a tangible thing the Marshalls have contributed to help strengthen connections in music Michigan’s music scene. I hope you’ll check out GIG - The Art of Michigan Music next weekend.

Since he began to make music back in high school, Detroit’s singular pop and performance artist DUANE has always attached a subname to whatever musical endeavor he has been involved in.

His ‘80s inspired, lo-fi, synth-driven performance artist project Duane the Teenage Weirdo caught the attention of Jack White, who collaborated with him on his seven-inch single “Postcard From Hell” / “Bubblegum Encore” on Third Man Records at the age of 19.

A ‘90s house-inspired project came next, with DUANE scrapping his Teenage Weirdo moniker in favor of becoming Duane the Brand New Dog. The longtime community organizer then embraced rock, Americana, country and glam, incorporating a band while getting political as Duane the Jet Black Eel, before releasing a full length album, unofficially, as D 313.

For the past several years it’s just been DUANE, the title Duane Gholston has most recently adopted to deliver his pop-forward version of Detroit’s famous ghettotech sound. The singles he’s released over the past year champion the city he’s from with bits of motivational banter, while his live shows incorporate Detroit’s famous high-energy jit dancing from a crew of backup dancers.

DUANE says he sees the different chapters of his career in the same lighht his creative influence David Bowie did throughout his career, embracing different chapters of experimentation and reinventions of personas.

“Always trying one thing and succeeding or failing, and just keep going,” DUANE said. “I’ve kind of been in that mode this whole time that I’ve been doing music on and off again through life.”

DUANE says he’s always felt like a creative outsider, regardless of the style of music he’s made.

As a teenager he embraced popular ‘80s outsiders who were able to have commercial success with androgynous styles like Culture Club, Dead or Alive and Klaus Nomi.

Even the two mega pop stars he’s loved the longest, Madonna and Britney Spears, have been met with some skepticism in a city that typically embraced more hard-edged music like rap.

“I’ve always been like the odd man out in this whole musical journey of mine in life,” DUANE said. “So, even when it is something as highly commercial and well known as Britney Spears and Madonna, I feel I was always in an alternative lane by embracing them, especially for the musical genres that I’m performing in.”

DUANE’s latest chapter as an artist marries his first love of pop music with ghettotech, a genre pioneered in Detroit in the late-’90s by DJ Assault and DJ Godfather, combining fast-paced rhythms and borrowing from Miami’s “booty music” with repetitive lyrics and looping basslines.

In addition to making music in a genre the city has put back on the map this decade with its latest renaissance of artists like HiTech, DUANE has used Detroit artists to help create the backdrops for his songs he believes have a “unique interpretation” on the ghettotech genre.

His first single, Up D Scoe, uses DJ Godfather’s Ghost in a Beat as its instrumental while also using a lyrical sample from Detroit rapper Icewear Vezzo’s Up The Scoe.

DUANE takes on all comers during the song, with his adrenaline-fueled freestyling driving its message of getting back up when you fall down.

“It’s very inspirational,” he said. “It’s almost like a sports anthem. It’s meant to pump you up and make you feel like you can do better than what you’re doing.”

DUANE’s latest single D Manoogian Jit finds him once again championing his city behind an instrumental he created himself that shares similarities to DJ Assault’s Sex on the Beach.

The song’s motivational tone once again incorporates a “Detroit vs. Everybody” mindset into its message about the city’s unique qualities and realness, with its music video bringing Detroit’s A-List Jitters into the mix for visual inspiration.

At its core, DUANE says his new sound and music is about highlighting the stylistic elements of ghettotech with his passion for pop music.

“I wanted to reference what makes my origin special,” he said. “I feel like every artist should do that, really. I hate the idea that people think they have to pack up their bags and move to some big city just to make something happen with themselves artistically or find a career.”

During the second half of the year, DUANE plans to release an EP of his 2021 song Intruder Alert, which will feature different remixes of the song that he’s opened up tour performances with more recently. He’s also got plans to release another single with a prominent ghettotech producer he has gotten a verbal commitment to work with, DUANE says.

Beyond that, DUANE has recorded vocals he’s since chopped up to serve to producers, almost like it’s an assignment, with the idea of them working the vocals into tracks he hopes to be able to assemble into a future record.

“I love how Madonna’s first album has eight songs, and it’s just all great dance singles put together,” DUANE said. “I would love to do something like that -- maybe like six to eight different producers from Detroit, just their all their hottest beats, as you could say, and me on top of them.”

Allow me to start this week’s newsletter off with a confession: We don’t have air conditioning, and frankly, it’s been kicking my butt this week.

As I type this sentence, it is a balmy 98 degrees and there are no signs of relief for at least another couple of days. For all of those who have advocated for my wife and I to get an air conditioner over the past few years … you win. I get it. We need one.

With that bit of woe is me (summer version) out of the way, I want to channel my overheating body and mind to bring you something I hope you’ll enjoy. Songs of summer!

This aptly titled playlist Meet Me By the Water, borrows song title inspiration from my favorite summertime album, Michigan’s very own Saturday Looks Good to Me’s All Your Summer Songs. Go ahead and put that on if you’d like, but I wanted to offer up 10 new songs by Michigan artists that I’ve been digging that have a decidedly summer vibe to them.

So, go find some water, enjoy a popsicle or two and play these songs loud. They work just as well in the sweltering heat as they do inside with central air (I can only imagine).

Momo Boyd - Oops

Let’s kick this off with Michigan’s song of the summer, courtesy of Momo Boyd. Raised by parents who were the founding members of the Boys & Girls Choirs of Detroit, Boyd and her sibling quartet of Infinity Song have gone on to be signed by Roc Nation, creating infectious and anthemic R&B laden jams. Oops is the clear standout of Boyd’s latest solo effort Miss Michigan, with its memorable “sorry not sorry” message about falling in and out of infatuation.

Michigander - Freaking Out

Nashville’s favorite Great Lakes State native, Michigander, has reloaded after his excellent self-titled 2025 debut album with plans to release a follow-up, Over Before You Know It, at the end of this month. Lead single Freaking Out feels like a logical next step to singer/songwriter Jason Singer’s brand of sticky sweet, confessional pop rock. Freaking Out leans into the constant state of anxiety that these times have become known for producing, producing a steely sense of resolve that this is apparently what it feels like to be alive.

GENA - Circlez

Detroit multi-instrumentalist Karriem Riggins has collaborated with the likes of Paul McCartney, Common, Slum Village, The Roots, Kanye West and Erykah Badu. He’s never produced anything that has sounded as good as he does on his latest collaboration as GENA with indie R&B star Liv.e on their stellar LP The Pleasure Is Yours, with the aforementioned Badu’s influence draping over their entrancing, lived-in sound. On Circlez, we get a glimpse of both artists’ vocal prowess on the syrupy, ‘70s-inspired R&B cut.

H8 Mile - Cologne

On their excellent new EP Bali Motel, Detroit hardcore band H8 Mile are equal parts funny and furious. On Cologne, the band stomps through an Antics-era Interpol riff with bassist/vocalist Charles growling about the importance of having a place to rest your bones.

Liquid Mike - Drowning Machine

By now it should be no secret that I love me some Liquid Mike. The U.P. rockers haven’t shown any signs of letting up on their latest single Drowning Machine, which offers refreshing tweaks on their ultra-catchy, guitar-driven power pop formula. Ushered in with a playful synth and layers of power chords, frontman Mike Maple delivers lyrics inspired by people he knew who died too young. It’s an unflinching tribute delivered fast and loud -- the way we’ve come to expect it.

Tommy Fleece - I Can Do This All Night

Tommy Fleece might be the prince of Michigan hyperpop, but Fleece leans on his pop sensibilities on his latest album Ultrasonic. Closing track I Can Do This All Night demonstrates these sensibilities, combining 8-bit synthesizer nostalgia behind a glitchy beat with dazzling results, creating an approachable entry point to Fleece’s catalogue.

DUANE - D MANOOGIAN JIT

The charismatic DUANE has enjoyed a breakout year with his undeniably Detroit brand of pop-forward ghettotech. The power rests with the city, DUANE announces on his breakout single D MANOOGIAN JIT, scooting along to a club-friendly beat that delivers a message to do right by your people.

Mod Lang - Cocomoda

What the heck is Cocomoda? Beats me, but every good summer mix needs a song with a made up word as its hook, and Detroit retro rockers Mod Lang oblige on this bluesy rock song from yesteryear. Chugging along with slick guitars and pretty harmonies, Cocomoda proves you don’t need to overcomplicate things, or use real words, to write a summer jam. You can read more about the band’s endearing appeal on its debut album Borrowed Time here.

Sleep Tight Tiger - Skate

On Skate, Ypsilanti indie rock band Sleep Tight Tiger are feeling the sunny vibes where the only requirement is to bring your roller skates. “Got no deadlines, just a setting sun that we can chase,” the band’s quartet of vocalists exclaim on this summer-ready jam, finding joy in the simple pleasures of exploring the unknown.

Kiwi Jr. - Pure Michigan

Hey, I get it man, lo-fi rockers Kiwi Jr. aren’t from Michigan. But you’d be hard pressed to find another anthemic summer jam more indebted to the Great Lake State than the perfectly titled Pure Michigan. The second single from the band’s upcoming album Blowin’ Up also was recorded in Detroit and inspired by a teenager’s relationship with the Detroit/Windsor border that has served as a portal to late nights of early legalized drinking for many a Michigan teen through the years. Yeah, that’s as Pure Michigan as it gets.

When hypemelo took the stage for her Movement Music Festival debut last month, she was prepared to pull out all of the stops.

The Detroit DJ was joined by a legion of supporters rocking custom jerseys with “hypemelo (313)” on the front and “Movement 26” on the back. Her friends and family waved miniature Dominican flags to represent her Latin heritage. She invited local jazz phenom Kasan Belgrave to accompany her set with a flute solo. She even juggled, bringing collective joy to the crowd that had endured an afternoon of rain.

It was one of the most endearing and enduring sets from the weekend, showcasing the talented young DJ’s warm and magnetic stage presence that accompanied her percussion-heavy, psychedelic set filled with nostalgic, feel good samples.

“Every day from the moment I got the news, if I heard a song that deeply made me feel something, I would consider playing it for Movement,” said hypemelo, whose real name is Sahira Melo. “Some songs were played out sooner, and others felt like it would only be right for Sunset Movement Set at the Detroit stage with your favorite people in the crowd.

“It meant a lot to me to display my heritage and the culture that has shaped me to be what I am today, to the world.”

While the 2026 Movement lineup was chock full of big name headliners like Dom Dolla and Carl Cox and Detroit techno pioneers like Carl Craig and Kevin Saunderson, hypemelo’s Latin/Dembow beat-heavy set was a standout among a talented young crop of female Detroit-area DJs who filled the festival’s bill throughout the weekend. The lineup, which included a Detroit stage for emerging artists, demostrated the fruits of Detroit’s nurturing of young DJs, particularly through its Underground Music Academy. Read more about what I thought about all of those performances here.

Inspired to get into DJing by friends on Twitch, hypemelo bought a controller and eventually learned how to mix on open decks following a two-hour crash course from her oldest brother, Sandy in 2023.

Like several of her Detroit female DJ peers, Melo was part of a loaded 2025 class of Detroit’s famed Underground Music Academy who contributed to the festival’s Detroit Stage takeover.

The New York-born DJ said she ultimately was happy with the love the crowd showed her, helping calm her initial nerves about the set with an instantly warm reception.

“I really wanted someone to go to the porta potty and hear the music from the Detroit stage and catch a vibe,” Melo said of the set. “I was approached by someone later on in the week that told me that’s exactly what happened to them!”

Beyond hypemelo’s breakthrough set, here’s a look at what it was like for three rising female Detroit-area DJs performing in the festival.

Duck Trash

Duck Groves, aka Duck Trash, took a different approach to their Movement set upon being asked to perform.

Typically, the Detroit DJ takes a “long blend composite mixing approach” they first embraced while playing cello in orchestras, with the intense and immersive long play format allowing listeners to “teleport between dimensions.”

For Movement, however, Duck Trash wanted to showcase a “differences make us stronger” mixing style, using the first 20 minutes of their set to play mostly electro songs, followed by 20 minutes of techno blends before a final 20 minutes of alternating between techno and electro selections on every other track.

“At a festival like this, it’s paramount for all artists to bring their own unique sound to the table,” Groves said. “A festival of this caliber is kind of a formal showcase of artistic statements rather than the casual setting of a club or bar. Also, the quality of gear provided to hear myself so clearly on such a big platform really allowed me to channel the hour-long art piece I had crafted for the festival, whereas I have much more of an improvisatory style in a longer format casual lower fidelity late-night setting.”

Duck Trash was inspired to start DJing in high school when their brother, Elliott, introduced her to the trap beats he had been making. In college, their friend Torian showed them how to use Virtual DJ and soon they began traveling from their home in Indiana to Chicago to take in house and techno sets. They soon found a mentor in a queer DJ class led by producer Noncompliant that helped them develop their own unique style.

Duck Trash’s eclectic and thematic set of Midwest techno and extraterrestrial electro caught the ears of fans from across the globe, allowing them to make connections with visitors from France and Italy, who later asked about the possibility of bringing their set overseas.

“I can hardly describe the incredible feeling of looking out at the crowd and seeing homies from so many different cities all across the US dancing together to my music,” Groves said. “... It feels more attainable than ever to actually travel overseas and share my music with the world at large.”

While Movement provided a reunion of sorts for Duck Trash to perform alongside peers and collaborators like hypemelo, DJ Sphinx, AK, Beige, and Milan Ariel Atkins, a busy weekend of performing at different shows didn’t allow them much time to take in their performances.

Regardless, Duck Trash said it was “huge” to share a stage with so many of their Detroit peers in a setting they described as an “inspiring vortex of techno creativity.”

“This year was huge in this regard,” Groves said. “It’s rare for Paxahau to not only showcase so much female talent at Movement, but especially so much female Detroit talent.”

DJ SPHiNX

After making her Movement debut last year on the Detroit Stage as part of the Underground Music Academy showcase, DJ SPHiNX took her set to the Movement Stage for her second consecutive performance at the festival.

The larger stage and audience setting offered a bigger platform for the Detroit-based DJ and multimedia artist’s hypnotic, cerebral beats, creating a massive, enveloping sound.

Being able to return to Movement and play on the main stage felt like a reunion of sorts for SPHiNX, who spoke highly of the influence Waajeed’s Underground Music Academy had on her creating lasting connections with other young Detroit DJs.

“It was really meaningful and a really cool experience to open the main stage for the first time,” she said. “Detroit can feel big, but at the same time, the DJ community feels pretty close knit.”

SPHiNX grew up immersed in jazz, with her father Gary, a classically trained jazz pianist, offering a window into the world of improvisation. After studying fine art and illustration, she began DJing in her bedroom before immersing herself in the dance music scene upon returning to Metro Detroit five years ago.

Like many of the DJs on the Movement lineup, festival weekend was a busy one for SPHiNX, who also performed at a Movement pre-party at Lincoln Factory and the Interdimensions Tresor 313 party.

For her Movement set, SPHiNX said she took a different approach than a typical DJ set, with festival goers bouncing around from stage to stage to catch sets, as opposed to a more locked-in club set.

Overall, the big stage provided SPHiNX with a platform to showcase her chops in melding together hypnotic techno, house and electro, with her acid grooves and layered percussion bringing together a seamless set.

“I’m more dialed in on what goals I want to achieve or what sort of vibe I want to bring to a festival,” she said. “I do feel good about how everything went. I think it landed.”

KESSWA

While KESSWA might be better known for her chops as a singer, the multi-talented R&B artist used her Movement platform to showcase the DJing skills she’s been sharpening since 2017.

KESSWA credits her participation in Detroit’s Seraphine Collective with learning how to beatmatch vinyl and soon after she began finding her way as a DJ.

A DJ residency at UFO Bar called Fruits of the Spirit furthered her love for the craft, allowing her to perform alongside friend and hip-hop DJ Gulley.

Performing at Movement, she said, offered her the chance to expose the audience to her lively mix of house, techno and R&B.

“At the end of the day, it’s just an opportunity to show the crowd who you are, get them moving and play stuff that is familiar to them and introduce them to some new stuff,” KESSWA said.

Gaining traction as an R&B singer guesting on Shigeto’s excellent 2024 album Cherry Blossom Baby, the Detroit Stage set allowed KESSWA to live in both worlds as both a DJ and singer, using the latter part of her set to sing, while offering the chance to play some of her favorite tracks she grew up listening to.

“Some people are here for the first time in Detroit or are new to electronic music and I just wanted it to feel as inclusive as possible,” she said.

During an interview with a radio station in Ireland, it was pointed out to Alex Glendening that there was a lot going on with his band Deadbeat Beat’s latest album From Here to Ohio.

Indulgent touch screen Coke machines that have flavors that don’t exist, the illusion of choice, condo developments … and that’s just the first song Peach Sprite. Elsewhere on Mellow, Glendening is referencing the 2024 collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore. Pink Dust references the LA wildfires.

With quotations, phrases and references to other music woven into the lyrics alongside the band’s jangly brand of indie rock, the Deadbeat Beat frontman said the band wanted to make their third album one people would remember.

“We definitely went into this record thinking like, ‘Let’s do a little bit more of a recording project than we’ve done in the past,’” Glendening said. “I would say this record is about expanding sonically as well as in terms of songwriting.”

“The whole thing is, I’m up on stage, being ‘look at me, look at me.’ So, I want people to pay attention. I definitely want people to hear the record or remember something from the record. That’s a big thing for me. I want to remember a band’s songs.”

Speaking with Glendening can be a similar experience to putting on From Here to Ohio. Sentences can take detours when Glendening comes up with better phrasing or a more entertaining anecdote to drive his point home. Recording studio memories lead to one-offs about the time he peed in the bathroom of the legendary Electric Lady Studios. A story about bonding in the car with bandmate Maria Nuccilli while listening to The Replacements can veer into a discussion about the band’s discography and the Ed Stasium mix of Tim (actually, that was mostly my doing, bad example). If it makes for good conversation, Glendening is happy to oblige.

If Glendening has a lot to say, that’s because it’s been a little while. Deadbeat Beat’s last album How Far came out in 2020, making From Here to Ohio a highly anticipated follow up for one of Detroit’s best indie pop acts. The band will celebrate the release of the album, out today on the Vancouver-based record label We Are Time, with a record release show at Paris Bar in Hamtramck.

The release and show feel like a culminating moment for the band, who have persevered and earned respect as one of the most consistently interesting indie rock bands in the Detroit area. On From Here to Ohio they seize the moment, delivering their best sounding and most compelling set of songs in its catalogue.

It’s definitely the band’s most “hi-fi” release to date, Glendening said, thanks to the resources and compressors the band had access to at High Bias Recordings with producer Chris Koltay, who has worked with everyone from My Morning Jacket to The Armed to Talib Kweli.

“I would describe it as more formal,” Glendening said. “I would say his studio is very nice. In southeast Michigan and beyond in Michigan, we are very lucky at the amount of high-quality recording studios there are. There’s a bunch.”

While it’s had a few different looks and members through the band’s 16 years together, Deadbeat Beat has always been a shared journey for Glendening and longtime friend and drummer/vocalist Maria Nuccilli. A handful of years later, the two were joined by bassist Zak Frieling, another longtime friend and person they bonded over music with, before adding keyboardist Pete Steffy after working alongside him on their last record.

The band has always relied on harmony-driven indie pop that initially sounded more lo-fi and off-the-cuff on its first album When I Talk to You, even if the song structures aren’t dramatically different than the songs on their latest record.

The guitars are a bit cleaner on the band’s follow up How Far, bringing to mind 2000s indie rock bands like Real Estate and the poppier elements of No Age; a more upbeat version of ‘80s college rock jangle pop band Felt and bands from the oft-mentioned Flying Nun Records roster.

The guitars come through even cleaner on From Here to Ohio, with Deadbeat Beat embracing a thicker and fuller sound with bouncing rhythms and rolling toms. The band’s core sound is elevated by the addition of Steffy, whose playful synths on album highlights like Dying on That Hill add personality and whimsy to an otherwise perilous opening lyric of, “I’m on the edge of a total nervous breakdown.”

“I will say that having Pete in the band kind of has allowed me to change how I play guitar a little bit,” Glendening said. “I feel less beholden to the chord. Not that I’m just only doing solos. Instead of feeling like I need to really fill out some of the mid range with my guitar playing, though, I can play less (and) it can be more dynamic.”

On advance single and lead track Peach Sprite and throughout From Here to Ohio, Glendening and Nuccilli seem more in sync than ever with complementary vocal interplay. It’s a song so catchy and rooted in the moment, it begs for you to learn the lyrics to it.

Finding the right lyrics to pack his songs into is a process for Glendening, who says songs rarely come to the band fully formed.

“Oftentimes when I write in general, I come up with the seed of the song,” Glendening said. “Like, here’s the changes, here’s a melody I wrote. I want to hear what it sounds like when I take it to the band and I see what kind of legs the bass and drums bring to it and also just like outside players’ perspectives.”

Having a steady band dynamic for a number of years, Glendening said each member of the band tackles different responsibilities, giving Deadbeat Beat an appropriate sense of balance.

“I think that Zak and Maria are both organized, responsible people, and I’m good at meeting people,” Glendening joked. “Not that they’re not, but I can be pretty gregarious. They’re really good at like making a calendar or a list of things that needs to get done.”

It’s the type of dynamic that has delivered the band’s most fully realized album to date, keeping Glendening hungry to keep seeking out the next earworm packed with current events and references to the band Can.

“I think that the reason I still put out records is because I think I am still getting better at writing songs, and that’s not to say I’m like, oh, I don’t like any of my old songs,’” he said. “I think every time I do it I learn something about it, I’m more comfortable doing it.”

Ask anyone who’s listened to Detroit band Mirror Mask to describe their sound and you might get a different answer every time.

Naturally indebted to genres like pop, garage rock and post punk, the band has appreciated takes like “The Go-Go’s if they wrote Joy Division songs” that describe their inspirations, which also include everyone from The Cramps to Siouxsie & Banshees to Portishead to PJ Harvey.

For brevity’s sake, though, they’ve sort of settled on their own hybrid genre: post-pop goth.

“It’s definitely morphed and transformed over time, and I feel like everyone has brought very different elements into it,” guitarist/vocalist Adrian Butterfield said. “But I would say still, if you asked us to define our sound, I think each of us might provide a different genre or different main inspiration. We all just pull inspiration from such different places that it’s hard to pinpoint what our sound is.”

Mirror Mask’s evolution as an undefinable and intriguing band on the rise is the direct result of a steady addition of new members who have brought new perspectives and styles of playing to the table. Started in concept prior to the COVID lockdown by Butterfield and drummer TJ Ghoul as a “goth-style garage band,” the duo soon added experimental synth player Shireen Mehrpay to incorporate elements of moody, darker ambient textures to its sound. Next to jump on board was longtime friend and lead vocalist Rachelle Baker, the former vocalist of electronic duo Little Animal, who was asked to make her first go at being a singer in a “rock band.”

The band was seeking out a second guitarist, but when friend and bassist Lauren Glapa tried out but didn’t have the experience needed as a guitarist, her abilities as a bassist still proved to be an asset to the band’s sound.

The result was a mix of sounds that are pop-forward but with a touch of unease when all of the instruments and the intertwining of five different vocalists work in harmony.

“I think that the having five vocalists and being very vocal forward with two guitars does give us a unique sound,” Butterfield said. “A lot of our songs are very poppy and catchy rhythmically with the drums and guitar, but then the synth will be doing some weird atmosphere thing over it that I think kind of makes it darker and just different.”

When lead guitarist Dina Bankole joined and rounded out the band’s lineup, she also brought with her plenty of experience and some cache as the member of around 20 bands in the Detroit area.

“When we invited her to play with us, we were very excited for her to join,” Butterfield recalls. “She was like the cherry on top.”

Shortly after Bankole’s arrival, Mirror Mask recorded a demo inside the emptied indoor pool in Baker’s house, borrowing the idea from another band Butterfield can’t recall the name of who had tried it before.

The Okemos Demos capture songs the band had been playing together for a long time in their basement, Slick Shit and Bleed U Dry. Immediately, words like haunting and ethereal come to mind in describing Baker’s vocals.

Done with the intention of getting some recorded songs available to send to venues to book shows, Mirror Mask’s DIY pool recording was done as an act of throwing caution to the wind.

“We were like, OK, that sounds like a really weird idea, this is either gonna sound awful or it’s gonna sound cool,” Butterfield said.

Despite a limited catalogue of published songs to date, Mirror Mask have established a fanbase behind their unique sonic footprint, resulting in building anticipation for their first full length album, which they expect to release later this fall.

Recorded by Shadow Show’s Kate Derringer during a set of sessions last summer at Rust Belt in Royal Oak and Derringer’s home studio dubbed the Echo Chamber, the band captured a few different aspects of its evolving sound during different sessions, Butterfield said, with the help of producer Greg Ahee or Protomartyr.

Butterfield said she believes the sessions distilled much of the essence of what makes Mirror Mask unique, capturing its dancey, electronic pop that evokes New Order on tracks like advance single Anymore, before veering into gothy spaghetti Western territory. Other tracks lean into the post punk stylings of goth pioneers like Bauhaus.

Ample space at Rust Belt allowed Mirror Mask to capture rhythm guitar, bass and drums in the same room before doing lead guitar, synth and vocals on another take, adding overdubs of the band’s five vocalists. An additional recording session yielded Under the Gun, which was written by Bankole, giving Mirror Mask what Butterfield describes as a “sound defining” song.

“This is the first song that she took lead on, and it’s really cool,” Butterfield said. “Dina just had a guitar riff and she was like, ‘OK, we kind of have like a beachy goth vision for this one,’ and my brain immediately kind of went to The Cramps type sounds. So, I just did a riff like that with it, and it just evolved. It’s really cool how all of our different styles kind of play off of each other.”

With 11 or 12 songs slated for the new album that is untitled as of now, Butterfield said Mirror Mask are excited to see where its vocal harmony-driven sound goes next. There’s still room to expand its already diverse sound, she said.

“There’s a lot of cool harmonies going on,” Butterfield said of the new album. “We usually have - not in every song - but I would say about half of our songs, there will be like a chanty, witchy vocal round type thing going on, as well,” Butterfield said. “We just keep pushing Rachelle more and more to get more comfortable with screaming and yelling in songs, because we love the mix of textures, where it’s soft and pretty, but also gritty and angry.”

Before setting foot in Hart Plaza in Detroit to attend the Movement Music Festival for the first time, I came into the weekend with a strategy: Try to keep each set you watch to 30 minutes in order to cover more ground.

This strategy enabled me to check out 38 of the festival’s 115 artists performing at Movement over the course of three days.

The festival, which drew tens of thousands of people to downtown Detroit for its 20th year as Movement and 26th year since it started as the Detroit Electronic Music Festival, celebrates a wide range of techno, house and electronic music made by artists from Detroit and all over the world. I wanted to be able to try to balance my experience between seeing Detroit-based artists and checking out some of the most hyped young artists.

From rain on the first two days of the festival to sunshine on its final day, I feel like this approach paid off in helping me see a great range of talent that is worth checking out. Here are some brief recaps of each of the 38 artists I checked out over the weekend, along with some videos from their performances.

Day One

Voices From The Lake

You wanna talk about starting things off with a bang? I was able to mosey my way up to the front of the Movement Stage, site of some of the biggest acts of the day in Hart Plaza, to see Voices From The Lake, the DJ duo of Donato Dozzy and Neel. This was a rare opportunity to have access to the front of the Movement stage earlier in the day and it was perfect timing to catch one of the sets I most wanted to see. While the duo’s hypnotic ambient techno is a patient blend of nature-indebted backdrops on their self-titled cult classic debut album, Voices From The Lake were a much more overwhelming force in a live setting. It was a pleasant surprise to take in a more hard hitting version of the duo, soon introducing me to the reality that it was a mistake to not bring earplugs on day one. Even at a much higher volume, Dozzy and Neel built the same intensity they’ve produced on record, making for one of my favorite performances of the weekend, right off the bat.

Octo Octa

I’ll admit it was a bit of a bummer to have to leave Voices From The Lake prematurely, but there was a good reason. Maya Bouldry-Morrison aka Octo Octa also was toward the top of the list of artists I most wanted to see during the weekend, and I was lucky enough to claim a spot near the stage for her set on the Pyramid Stage across the festival grounds. Fresh off the release of her excellent new album house music album Sigils for Survival, Bouldry-Morrison’s analog DJ mix showcased her talents and keen ear for old school beats and expressive R&B vocal samples that make record collectors’ hearts burst. You could tell by the wry smirk on her face at times that the records she chose had the same effect on her.

Stacey Hotwaxx Hale

The Belleville Three, Carl Craig, Jeff Mills and a lot of other men from Detroit get a lot of love for inventing Detroit techno and rightfully so. For my money, though, Stacey Hotwaxx Hale embodies the soul of Motor City techno. Sporting old English D earrings, Hotwaxx made a point to show love to her city throughout her set, which was bouncy and fun with the right balance of old school beats and crowd-pleasing drops. Hale’s mashup of MLK Jr.’s I Have a Dream speech intertwined with a sample of Michael Jackson’s Billie Jean felt impossibly American and the crowd responded to it. Hotwaxx is referred to as the Godmother of Detroit techno for a reason and her influence on the significant crop of young female DJs from the city was evident throughout the weekend.

Zack Fox

Often building massive beats behind samples of a single hip-hop lyric, Zack Fox’s set catered to those who dig ghettotech with a mix that was raunchy, imposing and incredibly fun. The rapper, comic, actor, illustrator and DJ’s set drew some of the best vibes of the day. Many of the fans who camped out on the Waterfront Stage were happy to dance on the muddy ground that had softened significantly following an afternoon of rain. Fox might not be a Detroit DJ, but he was embraced like one, with several Detroit-area DJs watching on from the side of the stage in wonder.

Stacey Pullen

I rushed back over to the Detroit-heavy Star Gate stage to catch one of the most underrated Detroit techno artists of all time, Stacey Pullen, who built off the momentum of Hotwaxx Hale’s set with one of the most boisterous and soulful sets of the day. A pupil of legendary Detroit techno pioneers the Belleville Three, the Blackflag Records label boss confidently delivered his usual brand of fluid, politically conscious, booty-shakin’ techno.

Duck Trash

After grabbing some food at what I believe was called Sweet and Sticky BBQ, I made a short trip over to catch Detroit-based DJ Duck Trash, another up-and-coming artist I was looking forward to seeing live with their intriguing long blend composite mixing approach. Duck Trash’s seamless transitions made for a shapeshifting set that combined their techno chops with an extraterrestrial blend of electronic, acid house and UK garage music.

X-Altera

Ann Arbor’s Tadd Mullinix is best known for his instrumental hip-hop compositions as Dabrye, but he took the Waterfront stage under the alias X-Altera, which combines jungle music, IDM, drum & bass and Detroit techno. The Ghostly International artist’s set was one of the more abstract and atmospheric of the weekend, with skittering breakbeats serving as the foundation for washed out vocal samples that popped up and immediately vanished in the mix. At a festival with more than 100 artists often offering sets that provided instant gratification, Mullinix’s set was a trippy, rewarding alternative.

999999999

The award for the most cartoonishly loud and brash set of the day went to Italian hard techno duo 999999999, whose hamfisted tunes produced off the charts BPMs. The duo’s hardware-only live set of thunderous beats and distressed vocal shrieks elicited an anarchic punk vibe that produced unmatched intensity among Saturday’s lineup, rattling throughout the Movement Stage and beyond.. It was something to behold, but I admittedly didn’t have the fortitude to stay locked in with 999999999’s driving rhythms and soon found myself seeking respite from their protracted, pummeling set.

Carl Craig/Cajmere

If you’re going to take in Movement, it seems natural to seek out a set from the guy who got the Detroit Electronic Music Festival started 26 years ago. I was able to sneak my way toward the front of the stage for second wave Detroit techno legend Carl Craig -- a B2B set with Chicago house DJ Cajmere (who also performed on Monday as Green Velvet at the festival) -- and was soon subjected to his unflappably cool demeanor. What stood out most about Craig’s set was his patience, using the early, bass-heavy minutes of his set to rev the engine before incorporating a melodic blend of smoky R&B cuts.

Disc Jockey George

As I entered the final push of the evening, I dropped by the Detroit stage to briefly take in Disc Jockey George’s set that offered a mix of anthemic hip-hop and techno. In his second Movement performance, Disc Jockey George danced along as his own hype man during the set with the confidence of a seasoned veteran, melding smooth beats with vocal samples that were heavy on the braggadocio.

Richie Hawtin

Richie Hawtin’s reputation precedes him as an influential figure in Detroit techno and his late-night set on the Pyramid stage illustrated how diverse his bag of tricks is while showcasing his precision as a minimal techno DJ. While many of the bigger drawing sets from the weekend were built around maximalism, melodic beatmatching and anthemic, nostalgic callbacks, Hawtin’s set proved his clean, hypnotic, meditative mix had its own large audience of admirers. While I didn’t get a great look at how Hawtin was operating because of how hard it was to get anywhere near the stage, his light displays were among the best of the weekend, making it a major highlight of the weekend.

Danny Brown

While it might be somewhat surprising to find Detroit rapper Danny Brown on the Movement lineup, his most recent output suggests otherwise. Brown’s 2025 album Stardust leaned heavily on genres like house and hyperpop, and was the focus of his Waterfront Stage set. I was able to sneak just far enough along the first row to grab some video of Brown, who looked and sounded great over several songs I took in, demonstrating that his recent sobriety and genre fluidity has helped him build up a reputation as one of the most forward-thinking rappers in the game.

Ellen Allien/DJ Stingray 313

After a frantic day of rushing from stage to stage I knew I needed to hit up Movement’s Underground stage, located literally underneath the other festival stages, for my final set of the evening. Paired with electro pioneer DJ Stingray 313, Ellen Allien’s below ground set showcased her prowess behind the decks, with her alien-sounding beats making for a really fun and cathartic set in tighter quarters.

Day 2

The way the second day of Movement was constructed, I saw it as the best of both worlds. The first half of the day included several intriguing Detroit-area DJs I had been wanting to see in a live setting before giving way to some of the festival’s biggest names later in the day. The only real downer of the day was the weather -- a good couple of hours of steady rain -- that made it more difficult to keep my spirits high and stay dry. Luckily my wife and social media guru Lauren was there to help maintain optimism and stay on track with checking out the stacked lineup of the day.

Tammy Lakkis

Tammy Lakkis is one of my favorite up-and-coming Detroit-area DJs and her set was perfect for kicking off a somewhat Detroit-centric first half of my second day of Movement. Lakkis’ all-hardwire showcased her polish in presenting a transnational mix of genres and influences.

SYREETA

Rising London-based DJ SYREETA’s infectious energy was contagious as more festival goers began to filter into the Pyramid stage for her house-heavy set. SYREETA made a point to connect with audience members throughout the afternoon, mixing her eclectic crate-digging old school house favorites with the popular, including Queen’s Another One Bites the Dust. Eventually, many of the audience members who had been sitting on the steps behind the Pyramid stage flocked to the dancefloor area, a sure sign of the effectiveness of her set.

Kesswa

While I am a fan of Kesswa, it is as a Detroit R&B artist who I was introduced to by her starring role in Shigeto’s album Cherry Blossom Baby. Kesswa has been DJing since 2017, though, and this was my first opportunity to see her perform in any capacity, with her army of pulsating beats, spastic synths and left field vocal samples making for a rewarding set.

DJ Sphinx

I made a short trip over to check out Detroit DJ Sphinx perform on the Movement Stage, where she delivered a set with thunderous volume and command. A participant in Detroit DJ Wajeed’s Underground Music Academy workshop, Sphinx’s second Movement performance was a rare literal moment of sunshine during what would become a rainy afternoon behind her set that was heavy with psychedelic acid grooves and Detroit techno.

Zoe Talley

Another Detroit DJ, Zoe Talley, was up next on the Detroit stage, offering a primal set that dipped into a wide spectrum of polyrhythmic beats rooted in Black music, from techno to soul to hip-hop. Talley brought together different genres in connecting new fans and old friends with her music, creating a mix that was so irresistible she could help but dance to it herself.

Donato Dozzy

After delivering an overwhelmingly powerful set as Voices From The Lake on Saturday, Italian DJ Donato Dozzy stuck with that formula during his solo set that once again hit hard in a live setting. To my delight, Dozzy’s bass-heavy mix and angular beats paired with his trademark hypnotic soundscapes once again tested the mettle of the Movement Stage speakers.

DJ Killa Squid

Few artists were as busy as Detroit’s DJ Killa Squid, who offered her videography services to record many of the artists throughout the weekend. When it was her time to take the stage, Squid combined her love of hip-hop, R&B and dance to build a party-like atmosphere at the Detroit Stage that was accompanied by a jit dance off that felt undeniably Detroit.

Kevin Saunderson

Belleville Three member and Detroit techno legend Kevin Saunderson kicked his family’s busy Sunday into high gear, following up a performance from his sons performing as the Saunderson Brothers on the Pyramid Stage. Ever the showman, Saunderson played his biggest hits like Good Life to the delight of the crowd, with a hype woman holding up what I believe was a proclamation from Detroit Mayor Mary Sheffield that officially made it Detroit Techno Week on the 20th anniversary of Movement. Even with the rain picking up during his set, Saunderson showed he still possesses serious chops as a Detroit techno DJ that helped him create the genre four decades ago.

The Dare

I hate to admit it, but I was in need of some irreverent indie sleaze as the rain picked up late Sunday afternoon, and The Dare’s Harrison Patrick Smith appeared up for the challenge to deliver a show. Decked in his usual black suit, Smith’s limber stage presence matched his cocky, ham fisted indie dance jams that channel early 2000s acts like LCD Soundsystem.

Hypemelo

You want to talk about a show stealer? Detroit DJ Hypemelo’s set had it all: Audio odes to her childhood home the Dominican Republic, juggling nectarines and a small army of special Movement baseball jerseys with her name on it in the audience. The Latin-infused, dub-heavy music was a blast, but the connection Hypemelo shared with the Detroit Stage audience is what pushed it over the top as a standout set of the weekend.

Josh Baker

As the rain finally subsided, my wife and I were able to catch the tail end of dance music producer Josh Baker’s eclectic set. The Manchester DJ’s mix was melodic and unpredictable, making for one of the best sets of the evening.

The Martinez Brothers/Eddie Fowlkes

I had hoped to catch Detroit techno pioneer Eddie Fowlkes’ set, but sometimes the timing just doesn’t work in your favor. Fowlkes waited his turn during the first half of his B2B with NYC house legends The Martinez Brothers, but I didn’t get a chance to see the Goodbye Kiss creator’s prowess behind the decks before it was time to jockey for position during the final sets of the evening. The Martinez Brothers, on the other hand, delivered a marathon mix of smooth, funky house cuts in an inspired mix.

Carl Cox

British DJ and techno producer Carl Cox arrived like a bad guy in World 8 of Mario Bros. 3, proceeding to annihilate the crowd that had flooded past the Movement Stage into the plaza’s fountain area to watch him close out the night. His extended buildups to drops and straightforward, hard-hitting beats set the tone for dancing, making him an ideal artist to headline Sunday’s lineup. We took in about 20 minutes of his set before making the call to catch our last performer of the evening.

Barry Can’t Swim

Several people have joked that it was cruel to put our final DJ of the evening Joshua Spence Mainnie, known professionally as Barry Can’t Swim, on the Waterfront stage as its headliner. The critically acclaimed Scottish DJ seemed plenty confident, however, in demonstrating some of the melodic tendencies in his mix that he wrote on his albums When Will We Land? and Loner. Mainnie’s DJ set showed his ability to pack so much into his melodies without it coming across as too dense.

Day Three

Tiga

After a couple of long days of festival hopping, I vowed to take it a bit easier on my third and final day of Movement, which admittedly included a lineup I was less familiar with overall. I started the day off with dance music extraordinaire Tiga at the recommendation of my friend Kyle, and it immediately made sense why he encouraged me to check the Montreal DJ out. With a resume that includes remixing artists like LCD Soundsystem, Justice and The xx, Tiga’s diverse set initiated a lot of dancing on the Star Gate stage, starting the day off on the right foot with a pro-partying mantra driving his tracks.

Salar Ansari

I made a short trip over to the Detroit stage next to catch some of Iranian/Detroit DJ Salar Ansari, who I recently was introduced to via a collaboration with jazz pianist Ian Fink. Ansari’s set was eclectic and disorienting at times, in a good way, switching up genres and styles at the drop of a hat, including techno and house that incorporate persian rhythms.

Tinzo + Jojo

As the weather began to heat up, so did the performances on the Pyramid Stage, where I stopped by to take a short break and sit on the steps. I took in the set of the duo Tinzo + Jojo Lorenzo, which was heavy on indie dance favorites like Daft Punk, keeping the crowd engaged and dancing.

Sillygirlcarmen

Detroit-area DJ Sillygirlcarmen showed off her many talents from DJing to dancing during her Detroit Stage set, drawing heavily from her R&B record collection. The groovy tracks were a hit with her fans and those who trickled in to see what was going on with her whimsical skits and her small team of dancers who helped elevate the set into an all-out spectacle.

Rudimental

I wasn’t sure what to expect from one of the most popular acts on the Movement lineup, Rudimental, which boasts more than 13 million monthly listeners on prominent streaming services behind popular singles featuring everyone from Ed Sheeran to Ella Henderson to Macklemore. Behind the deck, though, the chart-topping UK trio presented a more complex sum of their influences, frequently changing directions and tempos during the set while maintaining a commanding grasp of melody.

Green Velvet

After playing a B2B set with Carl Craig on Saturday, Cajmere was the center of attention for his Movement Stage set as Green Velvet, kicking out anthems from his three-plus decades as an influential Chicago house DJ. The Coffee Pot (It’s Time For the Percolator) author’s back catalogue was a big hit among hardcore house fans and those just looking to enjoy the party, with the former chemical engineering student and label boss of Cajual and Relief Records having as good a time as anyone.

DJ Boring + DJ Tennis

After taking in 30-some-odd sets up to this point, I was anticipating the set of DJ Boring and DJ Tennis more than just about any other on Monday. While I was particularly excited to see DJ Boring, the creator of some outstanding house cuts like Beautiful Strangers, the duo’s set proved how well they work together, creating a driving, bouncy setlist of recognizable hits and forgotten gems from yesteryear.

Nia Archives

There was no throttle on jungle influenced artist Nia Archives’ scattershot, energetic Waterfront Stage set I stopped to see out of sheer curiosity. Behind a cavalcade of breakbeats, the Forbidden Feelingz author had the crowd in the palm of her hand from the get-go, genre hopping throughout much of her set while maintaining a relentless pace while remaining grounded in her jungle roots.

Mochakk

Brazilian DJ Mochakk aka Pedro Maia held nothing back in delivering one of the funnest and most memorable sets of the weekend, recontextualizing his growing catalogue of hits with recognizable samples that stitched together the fabric of his dance mix. From the beginning of his Pyramid Stage set, Mochakk staged several needle scratches to ensure the audience was having a great time partying to his shuffling, dusty grooves that took on different shapes as the set progressed. Ever the crowd-pleaser, Mochakk’s frequent sampling of Stevie Wonder’s I Wish drew applause from the audience, eventually leading to one of the most creative drops of the weekend after twisting and disintegrating the sample to make it hazy and nearly unrecognizable.

AYYBO

A pleasant surprise as the evening began to wind down came in the form of house artist AYYBO, whose fluid dance mix came off as endlessly playable and fun. Despite only catching about 20 minutes of the Annaheim-based artist’s set, I was happy to be able to hear his standout 2023 tune RIZZ, one of the best jams of the weekend.

Dom Dolla

Drawing on pop culture phenomenon callbacks to sweeten up his mix of party anthems, it was easy to see how Australian DJ Dom Dolla has become one of the most popular DJs in the world. His pump-up jams and call and response interplay with the crowd made the packed aisles of the Movement Stage swoon in dancing to the recontextualized nostalgic mix. Dolla knew his audience and delivered an expertly-executed show that helped close out a great weekend of music.

As my interest in electronic, house, dance and Detroit techno music has grown, I had been setting my sights on experiencing Detroit’s Movement Music Festival for the first time.

For the past few years, I’ve partaken in some pretty sweet Sunday night after parties of the legendary music festival at TV Lounge, witnessing greats like Detroit techno godfather Juan Atkins keep the party going after a long day of thumping live music in Detroit’s Hart Plaza. It’s been a great first taste that has piqued my curiosity, causing me to dig further into the electronic and dance music the festival has been shining a spotlight on for 26 years.

This year I’ll be covering the festival and writing about it in this very newsletter, giving you all a taste of what Movement is like, how it unfolded and who the standout performers were. First, I’ll give you a day-by-day breakdown of how each of the DJs I’ve seen performed. The following edition is dedicated to Detroit and Michigan-specific DJs who are in this year’s lineup.

For those of you who follow electronic music of all kinds, I hope you enjoy the time I put into this coverage. For those who are on this ride for other reasons, I hope you’ll learn more about how this type of music moves tens of thousands of people every year.

As you may have noticed on Notes and social media, I’ve been promoting some of my more recent electronic and Detroit techno-specific coverage that I believe is worth revisiting, including features on Matthew Dear, who will revive his Audion moniker on Saturday; and DJ Killa Squid, who is making her first appearance at Movement on Sunday. Need some context on the history of Detroit techno? Check out this list of some of its defining songs.

Whether you’re an old head and still call it the DEMF (Detroit Electronic Music Festival) or this is your first time partaking in the festival known as “Techno Christmas,” I’ve also assembled a playlist that will help get everyone’s blood pumping. It includes many of the 115 artists in this year’s lineup, from Carl Cox to Carl Craig to Moodymann to Donato Dozzy to Barry Can’t Swim to Sara Landry. Enjoy!

The legend of Ted Lucas continues to grow in Detroit and beyond.

A solo rock and folk artist in Detroit from the early ‘60s until the late ‘70s, the late Lucas, often described as a “prodigious, struggling genius,” has seen his underappreciated music reach more ears the past couple of years, beginning with Third Man Records’ 2025 reissue of his lone solo album, the 1975 self-titled cult classic commonly known as The OM Record.

The reissue, which included four new songs, introduced a new generation to the former Motown studio musician and veteran bandmate who was primarily based in Detroit throughout his career, with stops in San Francisco and Manhattan.

The heightened interest of the late singer/songwriter’s influence is bubbling to a head in the coming weeks, beginning with a Lucas tribute concert, “Strange Mysterious Sounds: Songs of the Late Ted Lucas,” featuring a plethora of Detroit artists on Saturday, May 16 at Third Man Records in Detroit.

The following week, a more complete picture of Lucas’ career will be unveiled on May 22 in the form of a career-spanning box set Images of Life. The new collection archives Lucas’ work as a member of psychedelic rock bands in the ‘60s like The Spike Drivers, The Misty Wizards and The Horny Toads along with his early, more acoustic-based material he produced from 1970-74. The boxset also delivers Lucas’ lost second album Impossible Love, which veers into yacht rock territory, according to Third Man, while maintaining Lucas’ warm delivery.

With music described as a “seamless marriage of moody odes and raga style instrumentals,” Lucas studied classical guitar at Wayne State University and was versatile in playing everything from psychedelic rock to blues to jazz to Middle Far Eastern music. His music is most often compared to Nick Drake, but that is simplifying both artists’ nuances. Instead, it is true that both were inventive guitar players in the folk rock realm who use similar vocal recording techniques.

Taught by guitarist Jo Fava and trained as a sitarist under Ravi Shankar, Lucas was a studio musician for Motown until the label moved to Los Angeles in 1972, specializing in providing “exotic instrumentalist” expertise with his work appearing on albums by Stevie Wonder, The Supremes and The Temptations.

While only his self-released, self-titled solo album has endured as a cult classic, Third Man’s archival campaign intent on “spreading the open secret of Lucas’s genius and putting an end to his unfair anonymity” made me want to dive into Lucas’ work recently to better understand his different periods as an artists as they’ve slowly been revealed. As we await the release of his long lost second album, here are a few of my favorite tracks from Lucas’ career.

Strange Mysterious Sounds

There is an ominous nature to some of Lucas’ best work as a member of psychedelic rock and roll bands throughout the mid-to-late-’60s. This song from his time as a member of The Spike Drivers showcases his deftness as a guitar player while he cycles through a hypnotic listen of symptoms contributing to the singer “losing my mind.”

High On Love

This psychedelic pop nugget brings into focus Lucas’ ability to tickle the senses with his Ravi Shankar meets Nuggets inspired playing. Written as a member of The Horny Toads, High on Love finds Lucas chugging along with some OS Mutantes-esque freakouts thrown into the mix, real nonchalant.

Rainy Days

This is probably where the comparisons to Nick Drake are most apt, but the simplicity of Lucas’ vocals once again work in his favor on Rainy Days. I’d like to leave them all behind, he sighs. The song has a real These Days vibe to it, with Lucas watching time slowly fade away with a perpetual sense of melancholy. This is all tremendously appealing to someone like me.

Plain & Sane & Simple Melody

It’s pretty easy to get instantly hooked to The OM Record within seconds of hearing lead track Plain & Sane & Simple Melody. Lucas’ multi-tracked vocals paint a foreboding picture despite their warmth, offering a glimpse into the ultimate gravitational pull of his music.

I’ll Find a Way (To Carry It All)

There is a lot on Lucas’ shoulders on I’ll Find a Way (To Carry It All). As is often the case, Lucas handles this overwhelming sense of responsibility by giving of himself freely. The song’s beautiful arrangement and wonderfully icy flourishes of guitar create a backdrop as beautiful as any you’ll find in 1970s folk.

Baby Where You Are

If I’m recommending one song to introduce you to the power of Lucas’ understated vocals, it’s Baby Where You Are, perhaps the defining song of his catalogue and a standout song from The OM Record. Written for his son Peter Lucas, while he was still in the womb, this was a song Lucas would sing to his son waiting for him to be born. Lucas’ masterful employment of multi-tracked vocals gives Baby Where You Are a timeless feeling along with its simple but affecting message.

Love & Peace Raga

The gem and final track on the all-instrument side of The OM Record, this instrumental captures the true feeling behind Lucas’ music better than any other. The slow-moving tambura buzzing behind Lucas’ early picking in this eight-minute jam sets the tone before he digs deep to exorcise negative thoughts with his dexterous playing in this laborious live take.

As Mod Lang ripped through their set of high-energy power pop inside The Pyramid Scheme in Grand Rapids, you could sense the demeanor of the crowd shifting from uninterested to spellbound.

While most were undoubtedly in attendance to see garage rock legend Ty Segall perform the second of his two sets of blistering psychedelic rock that evening, the Detroit band of fresh-faced, ‘60s and ‘70s rock revivalists had the pro stoner rock crowd mesmerized by the complexity and all-out joy of their throwback tunes.

Although I was familiar with the band’s excellent debut album Borrowed Time, the live show was both a confirmation of Mod Lang’s “ready from the get-go” polish as songwriters and a revelation of how brilliantly they brought boundless energy to their sophisticated sound on stage. The leg kicks, windmill guitar riffs, seamless vocal harmony interplay and hook after hook after hook all felt so fresh, you would’ve sworn the band and its flower power duds had arrived via time machine. It all felt so fully realized and sincere, creating an overwhelming sense that seeing the band at this stage in their career was truly an “I was there” type of moment you could proudly brag about getting a glimpse of in retrospect. I, too, was spellbound.

To backtrack a bit, Mod Lang are a new band, but they didn’t pop up out of nowhere. The foursome of Antonio Keka (vocals/guitar), Alex Belfie (vocals/guitar), Ava East (bass/vocals) and Ben Taber (drums) have been playing together live since 2024, honing a carefully-considered laundry list of influences into an amalgamation of pure throwback power pop. Byrdsian. Fab Four-esque. MC5-indebted. Raspberries revivalists. Whatever you want to call it, this four-piece has got the it factor to pull off wearing these lofty influences on their collective sleeve without giving off the vibe of a style parody.

Describing the band’s penchant for penning ultra-poppy tunes in an interview with the excellent publication see/saw, Keka said his tastes naturally evolved from previously being enthralled by more “meathead” garage rock to embracing the band’s ‘60s sound DNA.

“I think all of us have always been obsessed with ’60s stuff, but speaking for me personally, it was always like simple, garage, kind of meathead hard rock shit,” Keka told see/saw. “But as I’ve gotten older, I’d see more bands that were poppier, like Shadow Show [one of Ava’s other bands] or Secondary Colors [Alex’s other project that Antonio joined] and that inspired me a lot. I discovered a lot more ’60s pop from there. All the songs that did the garage rock stuff had the pop hooks, and I just never paid attention to any of that.”

Keka’s references to the band’s other projects only hints at the wide-ranging diversity of Mod Lang’s sonic curiosity. Taber, known in the Detroit music scene as “Beej” in other bands like egg punkers TY and dystopian punk band Fen Fen, brings a discerning ear for detail in producing the band’s debut album. When combined with Shadow Show’s kaleidoscopic, psychedelic ‘60s-inspired pop and Secondary Colors’ experimental pop, you begin to logically assemble the puzzle pieces that fit together as Mod Lang.

While I’ve given almost all of these bands their flowers on this blog for their own unique sounds, Mod Lang still feels like it is bursting at the seams comparatively -- the realization of a collective vision that has been executed by a band that is clearly on the same page in resurrecting a treasure trove of sacred classic rock sounds.

Whether listening to it on record or seeing it live, encapsulating these instantly recognizable sounds is surprisingly difficult. Album opener What I Can’t Have rips through a nostalgic Beatles-esque riff before a mid-song bridge brings Todd Rundgren to mind.

Lead single TV Star makes good on Mod Lang’s namesake as a classic Big Star tribute, distilling the underground pop rock legends’ essence without a hint of ripping the band off. On Borrowed Time, the band give another nod to their Big Star heroes with an introductory lyrical nod to When My Baby’s Beside Me before launching into a dozen other Nuggets-era guitar licks. Even the band’s choice of live covers, Ramblin’ Rose, feels like one of its own, with Keka’s MC5-esque shout intro sending the song into a flawlessly-executed frenzy.

At a time when ‘60s rock revivalism has become chic among a new crop of indie bands like The Lemon Twigs and Sharp Pins (both bands Mod Lang has shared a stage with), Mod Lang possesses all the attributes to be flagbearers for this musical movement. Where the Twigs’ sound might lean a bit more jangly while Sharp Pins incorporates off the cuff ‘90s lo-fi indie into its mix, Mod Lang offer an entirely unique combination of gritty garage rock riffs and intricate vocal harmonies. There’s an innocence to these nostalgic songs about growing up, young love and feeling lucky to be alive that separate the music from being a retread. You’ve got to see it for yourself live to believe it.

Whether it’s the clothes, the band name or the back catalogues of revered bands from the days of yore that they know like the back of their hand, Mod Lang have discovered something special together. It’s a culmination of loving the retro sound so much that they can’t help but add their own songs to the cannon, and if you give them a chance, Mod Lang will win you over. Just like the unsuspecting crowd at the Pyramid Scheme.

I kind of feel like Ty Segall’s consistency and reliability get taken for granted sometimes.

With a deep catalogue of satisfying, unique material spanning from blistering punk adjacent rock to sun fried psychedelic rock to more spacey uh … rock, Segall has demonstrated the ability to paint in different colors throughout his career in amassing a catalogue of dozens of beloved, adventurous albums and EPs of unique garage rock since the early 2010s.

Despite a Bob Pollard-like reputation for prolificness, always delivering one or two or three albums a year, Segall feels like his reliability has made him somehow less thrilling. He’s not as good as Thee Oh Sees live, some say. He’s not as challenging or heady as King Gizz, others say. Yet across two blistering sets of extended hits he delivered recently, Segall showcased what is obvious: He writes the best songs of all three while playing a searing guitar with unbridled passion and physicality.

When my friend Greg and I had the chance to see Ty play two live shows in one day this past Friday at the Pyramid Scheme in Grand Rapids, for instance, Segall and his band assembled a towering mix of “eras tour” esque favorites along with a slew of inspiring new material across two unique sets of material.

The double bill of performances that brought together mostly multi-attendees appropriately came together as pieces of a puzzle, as Segall and his dream team of live Freedom Band era members promised early in the first set of the evening that there would be “no repeats” throughout the night.

Segall’s assembly of two unique setlists across two different shows also showed how much choice, face-melting material the California garage rock veteran has at the ready, opening the first late afternoon set with Wave Goodbye, a seldomly played live fan favorite from his classic Ty Segall Band Album Slaughterhouse.

Like Segall, his band of Mikal Cronin (bass, Emmett Kelly (guitar), Ben Boye (keyboards) and Evan Burrows on drums seemed to attack the challenge of a two set evening comprised of four hours of music as a challenge, playing no more than two songs from any one of his albums in the first set. Even when he went for monstrous jams like She and Warm Hands in the second set of the night, it was contrasted by a surprising amount of new material that all seemed to fit in so well among his classics.

That was perhaps the most revelatory element of Segall’s shows in Grand Rapids: That he could somehow take two sets of the best material of his career and have that be overshadowed by the five or so new songs the band delivered throughout the evening.

While Segall had regularly been breaking in at least three songs into his live sets recently, the new high energy, at times pretty, at times challenging material somehow stuck out for its urgency and confidence in the band’s new direction. For every energetic dress up of songs like brilliant psych pop standout Manipulator, sludgy early career favorite Finger, or playful first set closing ballad Goodbye Bread, there was a hint of something equally great on the horizon on songs known online as Glass, Nowhere, Black Paint and Chrome.

A new song I heard midway through Segall and co.’s second set that had an Oh Sees strumming vibe took the runaway freight train aura of the evening to a new level, before the band delivered several more fan favorites like early career breakthrough single Girlfriend, Twins opening anthem Thank God for Sinners and encore closer My Lady’s On Fire. And that was really the vibe of the evening, with Segall at one point pushing out two consecutive new songs as the crowd seemed to warm to the band’s more aggressive second batch of songs.

Segall’s sets also highlighted how entertaining he and Kelly’s interplay as a guitar duo has become, with Kelly willing to augment Segall’s always aggressive playing with interesting twists. Kelly’s assured and at times spacey contributions to the band’s later period jams like Possession and Void took the new standards into exciting new territory.

The entire evening accumulated the highlights of garage rock’s torchbearer for the past 20 years, delivered not with rushed ill consideration for their popularity, but with reverence for their place in Segall’s catalogue of heavy, sonically-varied songs. And even if Segall unloaded all of these songs across four hours throughout the evening in almost ho-hum fashion, it’s worth remembering that he routinely delivers something big and new at a consistent clip. Just try not to take it for granted.

After a couple of weeks of what I’d call “heavy lift” newsletters, the prospect of organizing a few thoughts about the Grace Ives show I saw this past week sounded downright refreshing.

The main reason for that, of course, is because Ives is the creator of one of the most refreshing pop albums of the year, Girlfriend. Scratch that, Girlfriend is the best pop album of the year so far. Nope, still not there. Girlfriend is the best album of 2026 so far, blending a wide set of influences including Lorde, Robyn and Sky Ferreira with Ives’ brand of compact song structures, effervescent hooks and clear-eyed reflections on getting sober.

Songs about “hurting the ones I love, being a bad girlfriend” and “feeling very alone,” might not sound like the formula for achieving a bubbly, ultra-accessible pop breakthrough, as Ives described the album’s themes. Ives leveled up, though, and didn’t look back, enlisting the perfect creative partner in Vampire Weekend and Haim producer Ariel Rechtshaid to work alongside longtime collaborator and producer John DeBold in elevating her instantly memorable tunes that aim at “trying to feel better” this time around, as she describes it.

While Girlfriend sounds nothing like Waxahatchee’s breakthrough 2020 album Saint Cloud or This is Lorelei’s Box for Buddy, Box for Star, there’s an indescribable “moment of clarity” kinship it shares with both of those millennial masterpieces and their sober-seeking backdrops. Brighter, more intricate arrangements. Go for broke synth drops that land like electric shocks. A weight has clearly been lifted. When Ives sneers that It doesn’t hurt me anymore on new career high water mark single Stupid Bitches, you believe it.

With Ives’ revelatory pop statement coming after hitting rock bottom, it was rewarding to see her live performance of many of these pop gems feel so weightless at El Club in Detroit, with Ives and her now-trademark pink locks strutting across the front of the stage with undeniable confidence. Despite a head-scratchingly light crowd on hand to witness it, the fans who made it out were unanimously into Ives’ dialed-in stage presence, keeping the energy high throughout the evening.

Bookending her performance with the two titans of Girlfriend, the unapologetic opener Avalanche and instant anthem Stupid Bitches coming in the encore, Ives sandwiched every memorable hook from her three-album career into the tight 16 song show that flowed seamlessly throughout the evening.

The first thing that stood out was how Ives was able to capture the sharpness of her studio instincts in her live performance, with live electronic drums and bass accompanying a variety of synthesizers. As a result, the show didn’t give off any “backing track” vibes, rather a more vital recreation of Ives’ carefully-considered pop song structures.

Ives, who has produced and co-produced her tracks throughout her career, would occasionally sit and pound out a few of these more hushed tunes throughout the evening, including Girlfriend standout ballads My Mans and Garden, with its line Lucky to be free from the hell of my pride serving as Ives’ mantra of the moment. Mostly, though, Ives was full throttle in delivering the more upbeat versions of career highlights, including 2019 album 2nd’s sultry, stabbing beat behind Mirror and the bouncy, dreamy Icing on the Cake.

On Lullaby, another career highlight from her 2022 album Janky Star, Ives showcased her knack for melody and her vocal chops behind the song’s sticky hook on a song about feeling the monotony of a Groundhog Day-esque existence. The song’s lyrics channeling isolation and feeling stuck were contradicted by the energy Ives delivered behind it, another indicator of her newfound confidence behind what is undeniably a banger of a tune. On Shelly, Ives’ tantalized the crowd with her ode to a Twin Peaks character lookalike that chugged along with undeniable charm.

Much of the rest of the evening drove home what people who have fallen in love with Girlfriend already know: Ives is an artist at her creative peak and she’s performing like it on her latest tour. Trouble, Drink Up and Fire 2 already feel like automatic additions to Ives’ greatest hits collection and they soared with all the delightful snap, crackle, pop synth moments and eccentricities in her vocals that make you tilt your head like a dog when you hear them with headphones on. In addition to the aforementioned indie pop songstresses Ives channels at the mic, the sonics of the set further drove home her love for woozy, crashing 2010s indie pop standard setters like Passion Pit and Purity Ring.

I’ll be able, piece by piece, to face the field of life, instead of running from it the minute it hurts, Ives fittingly pasted below the announcement of her new album on her website, borrowing from Sylvia Plath’s 1957 poem Letter to a Demon. In the same vein that Ives delivers compact, complex emotions in her brilliantly economic pop songs, Ives perfectly tied together the freeing spirit of her creative breakthrough with the memorable final line from Plath’s poem. Much like Ives’ music, it’s so good it hurts so bad.

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When Josh Garrels got around to explaining how he returned to his home state of Michigan to live on a rural farm in Niles, I had the answer to my looming question of his residency for the purposes of my Michigan music newsletter. By then, though, many more complicated questions had sprouted in my mind.

Garrels is a folk artist and one of the best at that in the realm of what I’ll call contemporary Christian music. To the crowd gathered at St. Andrew’s Hall in Detroit on a recent Sunday evening, he shared the story of how a head-clearing drive during the pandemic from his then-home in Muncie, Indiana, to cross the border inspired him to move to Michigan and buy an 1882 farmhouse on 10 acres of land in search of learning a new way of life.

The explanation came in the form of a spiritual testimony of sorts as Garrels introduced his song St. Patricks Breastplate, an understated but emotionally-stirring take on an intense, fifth century Irish prayer that seeks divine protection.

For me, the song was a rare moment that evening where Garrels’ music itself overpowered his testimonial interludes that attempted to unpack the intention behind his unambiguously Christ-centered songs. Garrels’ prayer for God to protect him on the road against temptation and the snares of “every false light” is one that hits me in the gut on record, and it did in a live setting. I was ultimately hoping for more of that.

Ahead of this show that was part of his 2026 Ancient Doors Tour, Garrels promised “more than just entertainment,” and he didn’t disappoint in that pledge. During the unifying evening that was largely consumed as a helping of daily bread to the crowd of mostly Christian believers, though, his testimonial interludes began to feel more like a sermon to me and less like a concert.

In its most basic terms, a live show is a chance to connect with the music you fall in love with on record: to see it and feel it performed with conviction, artistic competency, emotion and spontaneity. While Garrels didn’t lack these things, particularly with regards to his impressive vocal range and timbre, the show’s irregular backdrop kept disorienting me like the intermittent strobe-like flashes of light that blinded the crowd at inopportune times throughout the set.

Other aspects of the evening felt unnatural to me compared to a typical, secular concert. The normally packed bar area was comically empty throughout the evening, as one might expect for a Christian artist’s performance. A clergyman in a white collar blessed a man on his knees ahead of Garrels’ performance. I witnessed my first shushing at a show, when the crowd tried to shut down someone speaking at a ridiculously loud volume while Garrels delivered an interlude message about bridegrooms and mystics and warlocks and your lamp being full of oil. It was a lot.

The music, too, felt awkward at times, mostly due to the soundboard operator’s decision to highlight bass that overpowered Garrels’ guitar and the rest of the band throughout the evening. The crowd, while engaged and connecting as they sang along and added occasions “amens” to Garrels’ music and message, stood mostly lifeless throughout the set. While Garrels’ brand of folk music isn’t particularly dancey and you wouldn’t expect pandemonium, it all felt a bit stiff.

The only point in the evening where the crowd seemed to let loose a bit came on Garrels’ final tune of the evening, his most popular song Farther Along. The song is a modern take on an old Southern gospel hymn promising that answers to and understanding of life’s biggest and most mystifying questions will come with faith and time. It’s a heartfelt contemporization that concludes those questions will remain unanswered on earth, hinting at greater possibilities that exist beyond this life.

Almost every aspect of the song, from its calls for patience and forgiveness, to Garrels’ soulful delivery, feels perfect. To my ears, the message rings true. And yet, Garrels’ beatbox delivery, as he frequently dabbled with early in his recording career, creates the slightest bit of awkwardness that prevents the song from truly delivering a knockout blow I typically seek as a discerning “critic” of music, or whatever you want to call it. As you all know from reading this blog, I don’t need perfection. So why do I find myself ultimately not vibing with the totality of what is objectively a great contemporary Christian song? Why did I feel like I didn’t belong in this scene?

The mixed emotions I have about the song and the show were emblematic of many of my lingering questions about what contemporary Christian music is supposed to be and my relationship to it. Does it have to be overtly “Christian” in its lyrical messaging to move me spiritually? Is contemporary Christian music capable of doing that? Why does something I care deeply about often fall flat to my ears? The answers to those questions, much like the experience of Garrels’ concert, are a difficult knot to untie.

Seeking connection

To peel back the onion a bit, I grew up in the heart of what some jokingly refer to as the Bible belt in West Michigan. My hometown of Byron Center was known for two things: churches and pizza places. Growing up in the mid-’90s, I was raised in a Christian household and regularly attended worship services in the Reformed Church.

Contemporary Christian music was not foreign to me. My sister and I listened to her Amy Grant tape in our playroom on a loop, along with a healthy diet of Jars of Clay. Like many, I even gave their smash hit Flood its props. I also was friendly with kids who listened to Newsboys, Five Iron Frenzy, and Relient K, even if stuff like Christian ska-punk didn’t exactly resonate with me. By the time Switchfoot’s Meant to Live rocked the airwaves in my early 20s, I was ready to move on to more obscure stuff, despite its eventual status as an obvious heater.

Maybe it was the unearned cockiness of thinking the surface level alternative rock music I consumed as a teen was the roadmap to authenticity in listening. Maybe it was the questioning of my own faith from that time through my late 20s. Maybe I just thought a lot of praise and worship music I heard on contemporary Christian radio “sucked” with its generic messages and cheesy musical arrangements. Whatever it was, I kept this type of music at an arm’s length. I either thought I was too cool for Sunday School or I had fallen into a life of worldly exploration that involved partying, drinking and seeking out music that many would label as “rebellious.”

While I don’t think rebellion was my intention in choosing the path of a music snob, the taste I ultimately developed during that time probably reflected my desire to find “truth” and “authenticity” in every corner of the world, letting those influences mirror my personality as an “individual.” So, while that usually came from sages of the world like Kurt Cobain and James Hetfield and Ben Folds, I did find myself open to different variations of what could be described as Christian music that piqued my interest as I began to discover what I wanted from music.

My cousin, Nick, played a huge part in this, bringing Christian indie label Tooth and Nail Records bands like Starflyer 59 to my attention. The band’s songwriter and primary musician Jason Martin was humble, prolific and a supremely cool sum of a lot of great musical influences like My Bloody Valentine and New Order. While he’s a Christian, his lyrical output is not evangelical -- just a man of faith with good taste churning out good tunes.

Another band often mislabeled as Christian during that time period, mewithoutYou, struck a chord with me, mostly due to lead singer Aaron Weiss’ fascinating faith upbringing that still defies characterization, much like the band’s wildly varying musical output as an experimental rock band. Other bands/singers like Pedro the Lion’s David Bazan and solo artist Sufjan Stevens and Ben Seretan have gripped my soul for their spiritual honesty, with songs that often reflect the trials of losing or questioning their Christian faith.

By and large, though, I tend to feel music spiritually, so to speak, in its delivery. It’s the search for and execution of a voice that strains or feels on the verge of giving out for the sake of expressing an emotion that is hard to pin down. It’s lyrical ambiguity that attempts to understand or intentionally blurs the vastness of the human experience. It’s notes and chords that feel toiled over or discovered through endless noodling or playing until your fingers fall off. I’ve gravitated toward soul music because it gives me the feeling of a voice rumbling in my guts, achieving a feeling of freedom that otherwise feels impossible to come by.

Why does all of this music -- often not motivated by the Christian experience -- move me, when contemporary, more overtly Christian music I seek a connection to doesn’t? Maybe I haven’t listened to the right stuff. I could be overthinking it. Maybe music shouldn’t be so siloed off in my mind and heart.

Didn’t it rain

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve sought out and found music that is unapologetically Christian in its messaging -- true Jesus music -- from artists who are sometimes, but not always, known for it. Call it gospel, or soul or “shout band” music unique to the Pentecostal church’s United House of Prayer, but I’m talking about artists like Aretha Franklin, Al Green and Mahalia Jackson, to name a few.

These genres and musicians come the closest to what I connect with as “true” spiritual music, stirring within my soul a great sense of awe and marvel at their singing talents while opening my heart to the idea that only the divine could have created human beings capable of peeling the paint off the walls by simply opening their mouths. This music’s frequent incorporation of a hammond organ -- perhaps the most soul stirring instrument on the planet -- doesn’t hurt.

Jackson, in particular, had a voice that can only be described as a gift from God and she used it in uncompromising fashion, singing spiritual songs that overtly praise Jesus with unparalleled commercial success, selling 22 million records throughout her career. While many artists who are primarily identified as Christian risk being typecast or limited to wider exposure, Jackson’s voice proved to be an exception to the rule.

“People who hold different religious beliefs to her own, and even people who have no religious beliefs whatsoever, are impressed by and give their immediate attention to her singing,” music historian Ray Horricks said.

One of my favorite songs Jackson sang, Didn’t it Rain, is one of the most enduring songs of all time and it perfectly demonstrates what I love about music and how it can be endlessly reinterpreted by the artist performing it. A take on an old Black spiritual song dating back to 1919, Jackson’s version of the song is a more conservative one, with repeated references to the Bible’s message about God punishing the violence and wickedness of man in Genesis 7:4. Blues and rock and roll pioneer Sister Rosetta Tharpe’s version of the song less than a decade later is a more secular one of endurance and perseverance with reference to slavery and the “heat of the day.”

Decades later, Jason Molina of the indie rock outfit Songs: Ohia completely reworked the traditional version of the song with new lyrics motivated by seeking truth, goodness and resolve in a cold world.

While most probably don’t interpret it as overtly spiritual in nature, this version of Didn’t it Rain is one I connect with deeply on a spiritual level, with its spare arrangements and Molina’s solitary voice making several references to seeking “light” and “truth.” There are storms to endure and someone watching from the “calm at the edge.” Molina’s lyrics suggest we’ve gotta watch our own backs, which isn’t in the Bible, but he provides assurance that if he sees someone struggling, he won’t turn his back. In my estimation, it’s an amalgamation of the best we can do in the trying times on this earth from both a religious and secular perspective.

At the risk of posting literally all of the lyrics of this song that I would consider to be one of the best ever written, a few lines bring out a feeling I’ve sought and continued to seek in my journey to understand God and my faith -- to find God and His goodness wherever and whenever I see it and be there for others along the path.

but if you do see that golden light

that it shines in its fiery eye

go on and catch it while you can

go on and catch it if you can

let it course through you

and let it burn through you

if it’s the light of truth

try to see the light of goodness burning down the track

through the blinding rain through the swaying wires

if i see you struggle i will not turn my back

i’ve seen a good man and a bad man down the same path

i’ve seen the light of truth keeping out of it and told them to watch their own backs

In a 2004 interview, Molina was asked whether his music is religious or spiritual in nature. He only offered that he is “working out a lot of things in this music” and that the images and music come from a different place every time. So, at the risk of overthinking and assigning religious definition to every lyric or song or artist, “watching my own back” in the context of absorbing this song simply means taking what I need from it, which is one of music’s most enduring gifts.

Covered by grace

With age, I’ve wanted to break down the constant partitioning of music in my mind. I’m also more open to spiritual experiences in my daily life -- of seeing and feeling the wonders of God in every aspect of His creation, without questioning whether the music I listen to is “Christian enough” … if that’s even a thing. It’s the kind of openness that has led me to music that seeks truth and nobility. It led me to a Josh Garrels show, after all.

Feeling conflicted about how I processed the show, I asked my friend Aaron, who went to the show with me, to meet up for coffee to talk more about it and his thoughts on how music relates to his faith.

Aaron’s perspective is one I trust as a guy who can recite Bible verses and characters from memory while remaining approachable and humble in seeking to apply its lessons in the real world. He appreciates Christian contemporary music, heavy metal and everything in between.

Aaron acknowledged that the aspects of the show that I found awkward or offputting felt the same to him. At the same time, he conceded that even some of the cringier parts of Garrels’ testimonials or lyrical delivery are appealing to him in their honesty -- that he’s willing to take risks in delivering music and messages he’s been thinking about and believes in.

It all comes down to grace and “singing a new song,” Aaron said, a phrase used throughout the Psalms in the Bible that urges seeking out God with gratitude for who He is, rather than simply being comfortable singing the old ones.

“If you accept that grace is for everyone, there’s a place for uncomfortable, really strict Christian verses and hymns and there’s also a place for non-Christian music,” he said. “... I think the truth is that God’s there for it. I think he loves that we like making music of all kinds, from metal music to hardcore. I think there’s a place for it all.”

I’ll admit, sometimes I take this newsletter stuff entirely too seriously.

After a few of the ideas I was working on solidifying for this week’s newsletter fell through, I was panicking about what to write about. That is, until I remembered … you don’t need to take this so seriously, just write about something.

I sometimes get bogged down trying to keep all of my newsletters Michigan-centric. It can feel a bit limiting at times, like I’m boxing myself into what already feels like a niche subject to begin with. When I see other great music stackers just randomly pick out a song, artist or album they love on a whim and go long on it, I’m a bit envious of their creative freedom.

Thankfully, I received a prompt from my good Substack buddy , who tagged me in a post earlier this week asking me to name my top five favorite artists EVER. The prompt seemed impossible to tackle at that particular moment. Until I reminded myself: STOP TAKING THIS SO SERIOUSLY!

Breaking free from my self-created rusty cage, I spit out my top five artists of all time, which happened to include experimental ambient artist Tim Hecker, whose second album inspired this blog name, some of you might recall. Hecker probably felt a little out of place to some among the other artists I chose, including Substack hero , who suggested I write a post about who Hecker is and why he’s so important to me. A serious artist making serious music? True, but it was a great prompt for a post I was in need of, so I ran with it.

Casting aside the insecurities about what this newsletter is supposed to be about and whether it’ll find the right audience, I’ve decided to write about Tim Hecker and why his challenging, wide-ranging experimental music resonated with me more than 20 years ago and why I keep coming back to it. And while I’m no , or , I hope you enjoy it … seriously.

Sound Rationale

Back in the early 2000s, my world was turned upside down by a community of music appreciators on the social site Livejournal, which provided a message board-like forum for discussion. The community, Sound Rationale, expanded greatly on how I learned about music at that time, which was primarily through sites like the mostly indie-centric Pitchfork.

To become a member of the exclusive Sound Rationale group, you needed to fill out an application that existing members would then “vote” on by evaluating your music taste. You had to name your top 10 artists, top five albums of all time and favorite artists in at least a half dozen genres, along with a bunch of other super detailed questions about what songs reminded you of certain emotions.

The community’s granular level of music obsession was something I badly wanted to be a part of, but most of the members voted against me joining. It was a tough crowd and my taste was too indie. Too Rolling Stone. It felt humiliating, but also exhilarating to realize just how much I didn’t know and how much music I hadn’t yet discovered. I needed to branch out, level up and listen to other genres, they said.

So I did, and while some of the members of that listening community were pretty harsh, plenty of others were happy to help expand my taste, building a base with essential artists to check out in genres like jazz, soul, country, southern rap and especially ambient music -- genres I dove into and gained great appreciation for in the decades that followed.

Beyond the obvious starting points of Brian Eno’s essential ambient series and Aphex Twin’s’ monumental album Selected Ambient Works Volume II, a couple of the members I trusted most during that time sang the praises of other foundational ambient and experimental electronic artists like Windy & Carl, GAS, The Orb and Oval, along with a budding Canadian experiment ambient artist named Tim Hecker, who was beginning to find his footing after previously making music under his techno-leaning moniker Jetone. While these artists would all come to hold a special place in my heart, Hecker was the artist whose career I would watch mature and flourish as my taste in the genre expanded. In some ways, it feels like we’ve been on this journey of discovery and constant evolution together.

A new discovery

After hunting down the only Hecker album I could find at my local record store, a CD of his third album Mirages, I was immediately drawn in by the hissing fog of static and white noise; a seemingly neverending rumble of feedback and intermittent buzzing, pulsating noise. It was eerie but oddly comforting to my young ears. It sounded like My Bloody Valentine with the backdrop of a lonely city at night -- a mood that accompanied the album cover’s saturation of green fluorescent lights contrasting the pitch dark sky.

Moods shifted from one indecipherable track of processed noise to the next, until the album’s 10-minute epic closer Incurably Optimistic!, where guest guitarist David Bryant added some of the most beautiful crackling feedback I had ever heard to accompany a gloomy organ melody until both cut out like a lost radio signal. As a sad, college-aged young man lacking direction as I aimlessly sent letters to prospective employers at newspapers across the state begging them to hire me, it felt like the life soundtrack I had been searching for. I had to hear more.

I went backwards to seek out Hecker’s first two albums: His glitching, droning debut masterpiece Haunt Me, Haunt Me, Do it Again, an endlessly atmospheric and at times creepy affair with interludes of faint voices emerging like ghosts, only adding to his mystique. His sophomore album, Radio Amor, added considerable depth to my understanding of Hecker’s overall sound palette and mission of mashing and manipulating sound to rewire your brain, making you ponder deeply what they were originally intended to be.

Static voices can faintly be heard throughout the album’s entirety, culminating in the shimmering glacial texture and rumbling bass of late album stunner and Hecker all-timer Azure, Azure, a track that takes on three unique life forms as it unfolds.

All of Hecker’s trio of early albums are capable of being relegated to the role of “background music,” as ambient music might have originally been intended, but the complexity of Radio Amor’s layers showed me that those who return to his music for additional listens are ultimately rewarded. As one of my favorite music critics and Hecker scholar Mark Richardson wrote in his review of Radio Amor, listening to him is like witnessing something recognizable but abstractly awe-inspring.

In this world, all sounds are reduced to their fundamentals and smeared like mud against a crumbling brick wall. But the shapes are still something to behold.

While I didn’t need convincing to continue to follow Hecker in the years that followed, it didn’t hurt that he turned in his most “accessible” album next on his 2006 breakthrough Harmony in Ultraviolet. Listening to it now, it feels like the equivalent of reading a “Hecker for Dummies” book with its mountainous feedback and serene comedowns of pretty synthesizer noise. It also feels the most cohesive, with each track bleeding into the next, with the occasional jaw-dropper like the melodic, haunting Chimeras throbbing into focus like introductory theme music to an A24 thriller. At my first newspaper job in Big Rapids, Michigan, I proudly snuck in Harmony in Ultraviolet among my top 10 albums of the year on the small daily newspaper’s year-end entertainment page.

Required deeper listening

As the following decade unfolded, Hecker’s recognizability as one of the most consistent but uncompromising artists in ambient music only grew with each magnificent new release and collaboration as the genre grew in mainstream consciousness with the evolution of the music streaming era. Much like BBC Radio 1 DJ John Peel described Mark E. Smith’s legendary post punk band The Fall as “They are always different; they are always the same,” you could assign a similar description to Hecker’s music. From track to track, from album to album, there is an instantly recognizable DNA to his compositions, but surprising left turns of cacophonous noise are the norm.

In a 2023 New York Times profile of Hecker during the boom of functional ambient music proliferation, Hecker classified his wide spectrum of sounds as “the rainbow of possibility for people - extreme joys, incredible suffering.” His Bandcamp page describes his music as “questing and unclassifiable.” This is not simply background or “chill out” music.

In his profile of Hecker around the release of his late-period classic album Virgins, experimental music aficionado Christopher Weingarten attributed Hecker’s status as a modern ambient flagbearer to his meticulousness and perfectionism in creating “mostly pulseless, heavily processed, unapologetically suffocating, and aggro-noir” music.

“How Tim has managed to break through the proverbial noise and find a larger audience is somewhat astounding,” said Joel Leoschke, co-founded Hecker’s record label, Kranky, in Weingarten’s profile. “He’s not making new age music or even rock music. I don’t know how to explain it. What he does is not something that’s immediately apparent. It’s not a pop song. It requires deeper listening, it requires concentration, it requires you to pay attention to what’s happening.”

What’s happening are changes in tone and mood despite Hecker’s uncanny ability to capture a cohesive core sound, evoke feelings of turbulence, serenity, eeriness, bliss and even horror. Some of his later period compositions wind up and disintegrate with liminality, as they do on his appropriately transitional 2009 album An Imaginary Country. Others like the 2011 album Ravedeath, 1972 evoke a woozy yet unified sound from multiple sources including organ and piano tones to accompany his trademark feedback.

He’s also collaborated with an impossibly wide set of musical counterparts to expand his sonic universe, from indecipherable, alien-like vocals by the Icelandic Choir Ensemble on his 2016 album Love Streams that attempted to channel “Chewbacca singing into a saxophone” to the Japanese gagaku ensemble Tokyo Gakuso, who provide wind and percussion accompaniment on his 2018 album Konoyo.

These descriptions and lists of collaborators might be alienating or offputting to uninitiated listeners who desire escape from their ambient music listening experience, but that might precisely be the intention of Hecker’s constantly mutating, visceral sound, American post-metal band Isis member Aaron Turner noted in Weingarten’s profile.

“It can be placid and serene at times, but it never falls into the realm of being background music,” Turner said.

In Grayson Haverin Currin’s NYT profile of Hecker, he detailed Hecker’s labor-intensive process of creation via motifs like a delirious rhythm or entrancing melody; improvising over it, sometimes hundreds of times until pieces “pile up like strata of handbills amassed on a light pole.” Hecker then edits out the parts that don’t fit to create different feelings for these different moments.

“I’m using 24 channels of bleeding, contaminated, overloaded, feedbacking pieces that link to all the others. I don’t want a straightforward emotion -- the best things for me are the ones that are confusing as to how I feel,” Hecker said.

What I love so much about music is it isn’t beholden to any set of rules and it can express anything. It doesn’t have to be straightforward or formulaic or beautiful or comforting or challenging or perfectly executed in a studio one time -- it can be all of these things or none of them. Tim Hecker taught me this as I learned how to listen to music in deeper, more meaningful ways.

While all is clearly not right in the universe, it’s at least been good to see John Beltran getting his due.

The Detroit-based producer’s latest album Canada under his Placid Angles alias has rightfully yielded rave reviews as one of the best albums of 2026 so far, while several of his well-regarded peers like Daniel Lopatin have named checked Beltran for the melodic, emotional and jazzy techno compositions he’s crafted over more than 30 years years as an artist.

Even the younger generation, it seems, has gravitated toward Beltran and the breakbeat-heavy Placid Angles moniker, Beltran explained to me during a recent conversation, detailing some of the collaborations he did with up-and-coming artists like vocalist Sophia Stel on the stellar Canada standout track I Want What I Want.

“Young people really love this moniker, and I don’t know why,” Beltran said. “Maybe it’s the ‘90s - everything is so ‘90s now with the young folk all wearing 90s clothes, and it’s just where we’re at, and I love that. I feel like a super OG, though, when I’m around them.

Growing up in East Lansing, Beltran fell in love with electronic music and Detroit techno while making road trips to venues like The Shelter in Detroit in his early 20s. Releasing “Aquatic,” his first 12-inch on Detroit techno legend Carl Craig’s Retroactive label in 1991, Beltran has spent the next three-plus decades exploring everything from minimal ambient techno on his 1996 classic Ten Days of Blue to Balearic world music and jazz fusion.

During a great conversation I had with Beltran a few weeks back for A2 Pulp, one of the parts of our interview that didn’t end up getting published was when Beltran was kind enough to indulge me in summarizing his wide-ranging recording career, breaking down five essential records from across more than 20 albums and a slew of singles and EPs throughout his career.

If you’re unfamiliar with his catalogue, consider this an introductory guide to Beltran’s career from the man himself.

John Beltran - Earth & Nightfall (1995)

It’s probably best to start at the beginning. And even if Beltran says he isn’t crazy about his debut full length Earth & Nightfall, released under his own name, it belongs among his most revered works.

“I”m not crazy about the record anymore, as far as the music side of it, but it’s my first record, and when I made it, I was so proud of it,” Beltran said.

John Beltran - Ten Days of Blue (1996)

While the minimal ambient techno of his 1996 album Ten Days of Blue is probably where most who are familiar with Beltran start in naming off his essential works, Beltran said there was a time when he might have disagreed.

“For a long time, Ten Days of Blue wasn’t in there,” Beltran said. “I was over it. I was kind of trying to move on, whether it be the ubiquity thing, it was just kind of ... I’m done with that, but Ten Days of Blue is in there.”

What ultimately stands out about Ten Days of Blue is its surgical emotional resonance and deployment of melancholy to create detailed, fragile melodies.

“I love [Ten Days of Blue]. As we age, it’s harder to feel the things or even remember some of the things we felt at the time, years and years ago. Music can be very nostalgic. It can take you right back to where you were when you heard something for the first time. The older you get, I’m 57 now, more and more I just feel more detached from the far past, but I think Ten Days of Blue will sit there, and I’ll be able to feel that as much as anything when I look back on my accomplishments.”

John Beltran - Everything at Once (2016)

A true headphone record, Everything at Once finds Beltran ditching digital for analog gear for the first time. Channeling everything from techno to post rock to ambient to leftfield downtempo with the use of modular synthesizers, the Delsin Records release is one of his most detailed, thought-provoking albums to date.

“It’s a large album. There’s a lot of songs,” Beltran said. “I was using a lot of new analog gear at the time. I was always a digital gear head, most of my stuff was in sonics or chords, so it was my first time using real analog machinery, Dave Smith and Moog (synthesizers).”

Sol Set - Olá de Novo (2022)

The first release on Beltran’s All Good Music label, Olá de Novo illustrates Beltran’s versatility as an artist with its Brazilian soul jazz compositions. Working with friends including John Arnold, Jeremy Ellis and James Simonson and Blair French, Beltran characterizes the release as one of his favorite collaborations, with players and singers from Brazil, Los Angeles, New York and Detroit.

“It is very rewarding, and arguably the most rewarding when it’s all done, because you get to hear other artists’ voices, literally or figuratively, on your music or alongside your ideas,” Beltran said of Sol Set. “That’s really interesting and really fun, and that’s kind of the beauty of collaborating.

“I made (Olá de Novo) with my best friends. These are my best buddies ever and it’s a great record. It’s just so fun to listen to.”

Placid Angles - Canada (2026)

Beltran didn’t hesitate to refer to Canada, his latest album recorded under his breakbeat-indebted Placid Angles moniker, as his favorite under the alias.

The album encapsulates everything Beltran has attempted to express while recording as Placid Angles, splitting the difference between two of his favorite record labels that represent the 1990s and the UK: 4AD and Warp.

“Canada’s right there as my favorite Placid Angles record. It’s still fun, and I think Canada is my best offering. I’ll get a lot of disagreements, because a lot of kids love (2019’s) First Blue Sky. I agree that’s a good one, but this one really, really hits it for me.”