Thank you for reading (and listening to) Catalog Club. Look out this week for a playlist of my songs favorite songs of August 2026 and the return of 36FTVQ with Rob Mitchum. Also my weekly column on Thursday.

My new book “Is This It: The Never-Ending Rise and Fall of The Strokes (and Rock ‘n’ Roll)” is out next week, on Sept. 8. Please consider ordering now!

To all my paying subscribers — thank you for making this newsletter viable.

At the end of 1995, Neil Young lost the man he once called his closest friend, his frequent producer David Briggs. That loss haunts his next album Broken Arrow in more ways than one. For many fans, the death of Briggs signals a creative drift for Neil that really took hold in the aughts and beyond. Though on Broken Arrow, his bond with Crazy Horse was still strong, as evidenced in the Jim Jarmusch concert film released afterward, Year Of The Horse. But music was also changing at this time, with the alt-rock era that Neil was grandfathered into coming to an end, a development foreshadowed by the signature track on this album, “Big Time.”

I’m also happy to announce the Catalog Club artist for September 2026 …

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Thank you for reading Evil Speakers. Look for the fifth and final part of this month’s “Catalog Club” series on ’90s Neil Young on Monday, discussing 1996’s “Broken Arrow.” Also next week — a playlist of my favorite songs from August 2026 and the return of 36FTVQ with Rob Mitchum, on the recently released “Dave’s Picks 59.”

Over at Indiecast, I recorded an interview with Nate Amos of This Is Lorelei about his career and his upcoming album “The Singer In My Band,” out Sept. 11. You can listen (or see) part of it here or the whole thing at Amazon Music. I also spoke with half of the promising U.K. band Westside Cowboy for Uproxx.

My new book comes out in less than two weeks! Here’s a video of me unboxing it. Please consider preordering it!

In this column, I write about the protracted end of the once-popular mail-order record club Columbia House, what it means, and the albums I most remember buying stealing from the company. I also review new records by Alabama Shakes and Dogwood Tales, and pay tribute to the late, great Dolly Parton.

To all my paying subscribers — thank you for making this newsletter viable.

There’s a peculiar melancholy I associate with people or things that outlive their relevance. The musicians, actors, athletes, politicians and so on who once dominated the culture, and then stopped being famous for several generations until one day they just up and died. The ones who might still warrant an obituary from the New York Times while failing to register any acknowledgement from the masses on social media. The people who maintained their mental faculties throughout their rises, plateaus, and inexorably slow fades to utter obscurity. A process that surely triggered regret, then relief, and then bewilderment over whether this past, distant life ever really happened it all.

When it comes to celebrity, Dolly Parton — who was even better known at the end of her life than at any other point — is the exception. Even Frank Beard-level end-times prominence is rare. Most go out like Frankie Valli, the one-time pop superstar who already seemed like a dated reference in the early nineties when Lorraine Bracco made him a signifier of “big shot”-ness in Goodfellas. Enduring long enough to witness such a progression is a privilege. But still: It’s gotta be weird. Like watching your own demise in real time. To the point where the majority of humanity assumes you’re already dead. (Frankie Valli is not dead, for the record.)

Such was the fate of Columbia House, the record club founded in 1955 and headquartered in New York City, though many subscribers (seduced by the famous “8 CDs for a penny” sales pitch, or some other similar bargain) associated it with a medium-sized town in southwest Indiana called Terre Haute. (Also home to “the primary federal death row for men” at the United States Penitentiary, per Wikipedia.) In that town, for years, there were two big local jobs — shipping music out or keeping inmates in. Now it’s up to the carceral industry to keep Terre Haute afloat.

Last week, it was reported that Columbia House will stop accepting new orders as of September 15, signaling the final chapter of their 71-year history. The news was belated — there’s no other word for it, though it feels like a comic understatement. Nothing has ever outlived its relevance or usefulness like Columbia House, an institution that gained steam in the sixties and seventies (countless artists associated with eighties and nineties music namecheck the club in their teenaged origin stories) and then peaked during the salad days of booming CD sales in the nineties, when God’s Format™ powered the business to astronomical profits. After that came the inexorable fade, which extended to 2011, the first time I remember reading about Columbia House going out of business. Two years earlier, the Coen Brothers had inserted a joke about the club into their sixties-set existential waking nightmare absurdist comedy, A Serious Man, for a scene where Michael Stuhlbarg is hectored on the phone by a testy salesperson over his failure to pay for his copy of Santana’s Abraxas. A scenario that could only occur in an existential waking nightmare absurdist comedy, as Columbia House in its day was famous for its, shall we say, lax money-collection methods.

The news didn’t make me sad, really. Not at all, actually. Like 99.999 percent of the population, it seems, I hadn’t subscribed to or thought much about Columbia House since at least the late nineties. I actually Googled my name with Columbia House, just to jog my memory for any reference I might have made in writing that I couldn’t recall. All that came up was this profile of They Might Be Giants from 2015. “Remember the Columbia Record [Club]?” John Flansburgh asked me. “I remember seeing Flood as one of the records you could get for, like, a penny. Which was actually a real premium place to be, [because] there was only a finite number of records you could pick that were on the sheet of 50 albums or something. [I remember] thinking, Wow, we are really in the mainstream. To be one of the records in the Columbia House Record Club, it’s the real stuff. I felt like we were in the Carpenters.” (In the piece I mention that Flood, the duo’s 1990 release and possibly their best-regarded LP, was likely ordered via Columbia House by my friend Adam, who played it so much that I didn’t need my own copy.)

But while I wasn’t exactly bereft over Columbia House, I did still feel that familiar, peculiar melancholy. They say funerals are for the living, to mourn our own sense of eventual erasure from the world’s memory banks. So I held my own private wake for Columbia House this week by re-watching Christopher Wilcha’s The Target Shoots First, the best movie ever about the company and an evocative epitaph for the era it represents.

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Thank you for reading Evil Speakers. Please check out Chris Dalla Riva’s recent interview with me, which turned into a two-parter after I spontaneously started talking about the music-writing biz.

Every now and then I like to respond to reader questions. Please feel free to reach out with any pithy or thought-provoking questions via the DM’s! After this week’s primary question related to Big Thief’s recent “all new 29-song triple-album” live set in Nashville, I go through a lightning round of questions about Phoebe Bridgers and songwriting auteurism, Brandon Flowers’ “country accent,” Bob Dylan’s “most Wilburys” album, and a unique battle scenario involving The Strokes and Anthony Fantano.

To all my paying subscribers — thank you for making this newsletter viable!

This week’s first question comes from Evil Speakers subscriber Mitch, who chimes in with a spicy inquiry: I posted a comment in response to Big Thief coming out at the Ryman the other night and playing only new songs from their upcoming album saying I would not enjoy that (picture attached). Then, Gillian Welch (very nicely) called me out.

My question is this: would you enjoy this concert experience? I still stand by my comment that I would be pissed. Spending $100ish dollars to see a band I love and them not playing anything I know for three hours is honestly hell for me. Heck, it’s the reason I generally skip openers. I don’t want to pay money to hear songs I don’t know in a concert setting.

I think if they announced ahead of time, then that is totally cool because then I would be like ok not for me.

Curious on your take.

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Thank you for reading (and listening to) Evil Speakers. Look out for my weekly column on Thursday. To all my paying subscribers — thank you for making this newsletter viable.

In 1995, I was very excited about this record. It reunited Neil with Pearl Jam after their performance together at the 1993 MTV Video Music Awards, a clip I watched on videotape at least 12,000 times during this period and later referenced in my writing nearly as much. Though for some Neil heads, like biographer Jimmy McDonough, this was merely a collaboration of convenience, a scheme cooked up by Neil’s manager to sell more records and tickets to a younger generation. But on Mirror Ball, Neil’s chemistry (to my ears) with Pearl Jam is pretty undeniable. The album works for all the ways that Pearl Jam is not like Crazy Horse, particularly their youth, instrumental prowess, and drummer Jack Irons, the most energetic timekeeper Neil has ever had, before or since. Crazy Horse ultimately is Neil’s most complementary backing group, but as a one-off, Mirror Ball is a blast of pure rock ‘n’ roll joy.

Upcoming schedule for Catalog Club: Neil Young (1990-1996)

August 31: Broken Arrow (1996), also touching on Dead Man and Year Of The Horse (live album and film)

Catalog Club for September 2026: ???

Hint No. 1: This is one of the greatest English rock groups of all time.

Hint No. 2: They broke up, famously.

Hint No. 3: It’s a quartet (most of the time).

Hint. No. 4: Their career took place entirely in the 1980s.

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Thank you for reading Evil Speakers. Look for part four of this month’s “Catalog Club” series on ’90s Neil Young, discussing 1995’s “Mirror Ball,” on Monday. Also, I spoke with Taja Cheek of L’Rain about her great new record, “Fata Morgana,” for a special Indiecast video interview. And I talked to Jane Schoenbrun about her new film “Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma,” focused specifically on the surprising use of “A Long December” by Counting Crows in one crucial scene. (I have a beat and I’m sticking to it.)

If you live in the Twin Cities, please come see me and my buddy Steve Gorman on Sept. 8 at The Turf Club for a special event in conjunction with the release of my new book “Is This It: The Never-Ending Rise and Fall of The Strokes (and Rock ‘n’ Roll).” You can buy tickets here.

In my regular feature “Jukebox Jury,” I review a bunch recent releases and grade them Robert Christgau “Consumer Guide” style. In this column, in response to a heavy release schedule, I’m reviewing a batch of new albums coming out this week and next, including: Brandon Flowers, Billy Strings, Brennan Wedl, Westside Cowboy, Wild Pink, Mike D, Interpol, Sweeping Promises, King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard, and Weezer. Plus, I wrote about just-released songs by Fontaines DC, Gang Of Youths, Bill Fox and Beck.

To all my paying subscribers — thank you for making this newsletter viable.

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Thank you for reading Evil Speakers. Every now and then I like to respond to reader questions like this one. Please feel free to reach out with any pithy or thought-provoking questions via the DM’s!

Also: Please pre-order my book! It’s called “Is This It: The Never-Ending Rise and Fall of The Strokes (and Rock ‘n’ Roll),” and it’s out Sept. 8. PopMatters just called it “an entertaining and often amusing defense of a band whose importance has always been easier to understand as a cultural phenomenon than as a straightforward commercial success.” I’ll take it!

To all my paying subscribers — thank you for making this newsletter viable.

This week’s question didn’t come from one person, but rather many, many people that have asked me in the past few days, in so many words: Can you please review the ridiculous new album by ESPN’s Pat McAfee?

The short answer is “of course I can, though I must also insist on making a larger point about How Things Are Right Now.”

For those who are unfamiliar: Pat McAfee is a former NFL kicker who is currently one of the most prominent voices on ESPN, the sports cable network that like MTV was once beloved in the eighties and nineties, but now has fully devolved into unwatchable reality TV starring a shrinking number of personalities that nobody on Earth actually likes but nonetheless scan as “famous.” Even those populating Pat’s own inner circle apparently can’t stand the man, as nobody talked him out of releasing The Diary Of A Polarizing Figure, a mélange of shopworn country, boilerplate trap, and the sort of uncut and unrelenting grievance that only a man who is reportedly set to make $60 million per year to wear tank tops and look relatively cogent while standing next to the oversized slab of molded Silly Putty that is AJ Hawk’s face can reasonably muster.

Before we get into this, I need to register my usual reservations when it comes to pans of self-evidently garbage albums. 1) I don’t necessarily relish reviewing a preordained artistic disaster, even when it’s made by a rich malignant doofus, the easiest and most satisfying target there is; 2) The very easiness of the target is why I don’t relish it; 3) Because mocking rich malignant doofuses, while undoubtedly fun and popular on the internet, often distracts from some deeper truth that’s more interesting and probably more meaningful.

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Thank you for reading (and listening to) Evil Speakers. This is part three of this month’s series on ’90s Neil Young. Look for my weekly column on Thursday, which will include reviews of several upcoming albums by Weezer, Brandon Flowers, Interpol, and more. To all my paying subscribers — thank you for making this newsletter viable.

“It’s better to burn out than to fade away” not only is the most famous lyric ever written by Neil Young, it’s one of the most iconic lines in rock history. And it’s haunted the author ever since it appeared on 1979’s Rust Never Sleeps. Fifteen years after that album, Neil was confronted with the implications of the lyric when Kurt Cobain put it at the end of his suicide note, a development that haunts the album we’re talking about today, Sleeps With Angels. In some ways this record continues Neil’s reimagining of his classic work in the ’90s — similar to how Ragged Glory expounds on Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere and Harvest Moon revisits Harvest, Sleeps With Angels evokes the underbelly grime of his “ditch” period, though it’s even darker this time around. A difficult and painful record, Sleeps With Angels ranks with Neil’s bleakest musical statements.

Upcoming schedule for Catalog Club: Neil Young (1990-1996)

August 24: Mirror Ball (1995)

August 31: Broken Arrow (1996), also touching on Dead Man and Year Of The Horse (live album and film)

Catalog Club for September 2026: ???

Hint No. 1: This is one of the greatest English rock groups of all time.

Hint No. 2: They broke up, famously.

Hint No. 3: It’s a quartet (most of the time).

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Thank you for reading Evil Speakers. This essay is about the new Phoebe Bridgers album “Lost Weekend,” as well as the nature of indie rock stardom in a time of collapsing online music media and my picks for the Top 10 most important indie rock stars, as it stands in 2026.

But before we get to that: I am going on tour this fall! It’s for my new book out Sept. 8, “Is This It: The Never-Ending Rise and Fall of The Strokes (and Rock ‘n’ Roll).” The biggest upcoming event will be on Sept. 8, in collaboration with the folks behind the historic First Avenue in Minneapolis. I’m so honored that they reached out and wanted to do this! I’ll be at the Turf Club in St. Paul, one of my fave music venues, with my good friend Steve Gorman. You can buy a regular ticket or a ticket with a book. That’s two Steve’s for the price of one! Please purchase tickets here!

In October, I’ll be on the road for some Midwest dates. It’s possible I’ll be adding more dates in cities outside this area, keep your eyes peeled here!

To all my paying subscribers — thank you for making this newsletter viable.

Before I get to Lost Weekend, the first Phoebe Bridgers solo album in six years, and the all-important 2026 power rankings for “most important indie stars,” I need to go on a tangent. I promise it’s an entertaining tangent, a story about “how things work” in my frequently absurd business that eventually links to the overall thesis of this essay. Besides, it’s nearing the end of summer — we’re all taking our time on getting things done right now.

About two months ago, I had a strange encounter with a publicist who represents (among other clients) a medium-popular but very well-reviewed Middle American indie-rock “nice guy” singer-songwriter. At the time I had just written and said some critical things about this artist’s recent album as well as his overall body of work. The publicist was apparently upset about this, despite near-unanimous praise for the record from basically everyone else, and he chose to publicly respond, indirectly, by posting a screenshot of my column from the week after the offending piece. And then he added this caption: “The sort of thing that makes me welcome the cold deathly embrace of AI.”

Confused? Welcome to my life! In time I recognized this as a classic proxy war situation. The Vietnam of petty music-industry feuds, if you will. (Honestly, it’s way dumber than that: On Indiecast, I likened it to that episode of The Sopranos where Tony beats up the bartender at The Bada Bing because he’s actually mad at his mother.) Things got stranger and altogether worse when I tried to privately clear the air in a followup email and was met with the most hyperbolic invective I’ve ever received from a PR representative in my 26-year (as of this week!) media career. (Sample excerpt: “I get people have to make a living. I just think it’s a bit more of a hellscape when we are subjected to the sort of shit I saw on your Substack.” That was him just getting warmed up. Before even seeing the paid tier!)

What’s funny is the “nice guy” singer-songwriter never came up once by name in our back and forth. The publicist instead insisted he was angry about this Guided By Voices column, admittedly the most arcane and nerdiest post I’ve yet published in this newsletter. He called it “brain rot” for an audience of “40-year-old IPA drinkers whose cultural identity is Pardon The Interruption,” an ironic burn considering the artist we were actually, implicitly, talking about. (There’s literally an IPA beer named after one of this person’s songs.) “I think it’s bad for music, so I chose to mock it,” he concluded.

Bad for music? Moi? Because I wrote about Dan “Fretless” Toohey?? I couldn’t help but be mystified by the juxtaposition between the bombast of this thorough roasting and the innocuously chill album that unwittingly sparked it, the one that (in Pitchfork’s estimation) “balances contentment and mortal anxiety.” Alas, there would be no countervailing contentment coming my way in this instance. “Mortal anxiety” was all I deserved, mister!

But let’s not digress too much here: The implication of the publicist’s joke was that AI is preferable to me, a poor human schlub trying to make an honest living (and succeeding somehow) in this so-called contemporary “hellscape.” It was, again, strange, especially in this moment when so many indie-music outlets are going under. (RIP Brooklyn Vegan, by the way, though more importantly check out Andrew Sacher’s new Substack!)

Could this guy not see that we are stuck in the same boat? Clearly, my delusional counterpart did not feel the cold water also rising at his knees. Unfortunately for him, it’s a plain fact that a future dominated by AI bots will be even tougher for the denizens of the indie-rock publicity business than it is for writers like myself. Super-intelligent robots are, at the very least, interested for the time being in sucking the data out of my work. What they don’t read are PR emails, and they probably won’t need anyone to “circle back” once more to see if the sentient machine overlords have finally listened to their exclusive watermarked promo album streams.

Now, when I practice empathy, as one always should, I can see that my publicist friend was P.O.’ed because he saw me as an obstacle getting in the way of him doing his job, which is convincing the public that his client is (to quote Dirk Diggler) “a big, bright, shining star.” That thing Phoebe Bridgers unquestionably is. And what most musicians, even great ones, are not.

Stardom (and particularly indie rock stardom) is felt more than counted. Yes, it can be theoretically quantified and credentialed in any number of ways. Songs streamed, tickets sold, social-media platforms followed, awards won, glowing reviews rendered, Hot Ones successfully eaten and Chicken Shop Dates platonically executed — they all qualify as relevant rubrics. But in the end these measures of success don’t always line up with the vibes of fame.

The truth is that stardom, like pornography, is a “know it when you see it” proposition. Which is why I have adopted my own measure of fame (or indie fame, per the conversation), which is entirely vibes-based though I think it more accurately reflects how we as fans generally conceptualize such matters. More than average monthly listeners of Spotify. More than the type-face size on a festival poster. More than the number of likes on an Insta post where an artist “unboxes” their latest record. More than all of it.

This is what matters most for determining who is an important indie-rock star: “If you do something that by most standards of human endeavor is considered insignificant and/or plainly unexciting, but it is reported as urgent news, you are an important indie-rock star.”

That’s it. Simple. Definitive. Clear. Though it’s also true that this benchmark has been eroded in recent years by the decline of mainstream media institutions that “report urgent news.” There’s even an argument to be made that “indie stardom” as we know it starts to evaporate as common informational touchstones — the very targets of all those PR emails — crumble and are replaced by a series of smaller and niche-ier content silos (like this newsletter you’re reading right now). Because indie stardom, more than regular stardom, relies on collective media-generated perception, at least until the more tangible sales-based rubrics start to kick in.

That perception-creation machine has never been more fragile. Which maybe isn’t entirely a bad thing, really, in terms of art and music. (Dismantling a system where, say a publicist might go after skeptical critics on behalf of the precious few artists who can afford their fees does have its upsides, I suppose.) Though, frankly, I think big indie stars are fun to write and talk about, as they’re among the few remaining topics that music fans of all kinds can commune over before we all retire permanently to our respective corners of the once worldly and wide-seeming web.

With that in mind, here are my power rankings for the Top 10 “most important indie stars” as of this very moment in 2026, with “importance” measured by how the faded but still kind of intact media apparatus makes us care about relatively unimportant things these individuals perpetrate.

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Thank you for reading (and listening to) Evil Speakers. I have a new book coming out in about a month! It’s called “Is This It: The Never-Ending Rise and Fall of The Strokes (and Rock ‘n’ Roll),” and it’s out September 8. After reading this book, Joe Hagan declared that I am “a critic of bracing honesty, intelligence, wit, and charm, probably the closest modern successor to the great Lester Bangs.” Wow, this book might drive you to say such crazy things as well! Please consider pre-ordering now!

To all my paying subscribers — thank you for making this newsletter viable.

Twisted Teens is one of my favorite bands of 2026. The New Orleans garage-rock duo has already put out two very worthy albums this year — Blame The Clown in the late winter and the even better Florida Water Blues this summer. And it sounds like they have a third LP — a break-up album the band likens to Blood On The Tracks — this fall. I figured it was worth reaching out to singer-songwriter Caspian Hollywell over Instagram to see if he would want to talk, and thankfully he agreed. Once we hopped on Zoom, I was pleased to find that Caspian is just as lively in conversation as he is on record. We talked about his long, winding journey in life and music, including his time riding the rails (literally), his experience playing and learning about old time traditional music, and how he’s now centered on writing “bangers” while subtly aping the visual aesthetic of Cheap Trick. Great band, great conversation!

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Thank you for reading (and listening to) Evil Speakers. This is part two of this month’s series on ’90s Neil. Look for a special bonus audio post this week, featuring an interview with one of my favorite bands of 2026, Twisted Teens. Also, my weekly column on Thursday, which will discuss the new Phoebe Bridgers album. To all my paying subscribers — thank you for making this newsletter viable.

After the tour with Crazy Horse in support of Ragged Glory, Neil Young (no surprise) shredded his hearing. As part of his recovery, he did something he swore he wouldn’t do for 20 years — make a middle of the road singer-songwriter album in the mold of Harvest, his biggest album of the 1970s. In that respect, 1992’s Harvest Moon can be classified as perhaps his most conservative record. But is “conservative” a pejorative in this context? It’s certainly not given how flat-out beautiful this album is. Derived largely from songs he had started in the seventies, Harvest Moon ranks with his finest works in terms of songwriting, with Neil’s wondrous country-folk melodies paired with lyrics that ponder the durability of long-term relationships and what it takes to sustain them. In that sense, it’s a record Neil could have only made in his 40s — the homiest, warmest and wisest record about domesticity ever made.

August 17: Sleeps With Angels (1994)

August 24: Mirror Ball (1995)

August 31: Broken Arrow (1996), also touching on Dead Man and Year Of The Horse (live album and film)

Catalog Club for September 2026: ???

Hint No. 1: This is one of the greatest English rock groups of all time.

Hint No. 2: They broke up, famously.

Read more

Thank you for reading Evil Speakers. In almost exactly one month, my new book will arrive in stores. It’s called “Is This It: The Rise and Fall of The Strokes (and Rock ‘n’ Roll),” it’s out Sept. 8, and you can pre-order it now. In the fall I’ll be doing some book events, all in the Midwest (for now!) I’ll be sharing those dates soon.

This essay is a critical overview of alt-rock (and alt-rock adjacent) albums released in 1996 in light of those albums turning 30 in 2026, as well as the overall trend of alt-rock’s commercial (though not necessarily artistic) decline during that year, written in the essay style of “The Rolling Stone Record Guide” and “Spin Alternative Record Guide,” books I grew up reading and still love that were nevertheless rendered irrelevant by the internet. Until now!

To all my paying subscribers — thank you for making this newsletter viable.

I. How The West Was Won And Where It Got Us

More than any other art form, popular music lends itself to analysis overly inured to intense myopia. The old “all the best songs ever written just happened to come out when I was in high school and college” phenomenon. So consider this a self-aware disclaimer for what I otherwise believe are two air-tight assessments.

Assessment No. 1: The nineties — as an era of rock music — began in late summer of 1991, right before the season switched over to autumn. I refer to the stretch of time from early August to late September when the following albums were released, nearly one per week: Metallica’s “Black Album,” Pearl Jam’s Ten, Guns N’ Roses’ Use Your Illusion(s) I and II, Nirvana’s Nevermind, Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Blood Sugar Sex Magik, and Soundgarden’s Badmotorfinger. I also turned 14 and entered eighth grade during this span this time. Though I think you’ll agree, even with the aforementioned “intense myopia” factor, that these albums don’t sound like the start of a new era to just me. They, in fact, look and sound like the start of a whole new chapter of so-called “classic rock,” a virtual starter kit for the nation’s least imaginative AOR radio stations.

Assessment No. 2: The nineties — again, in the parlance of rock, especially alt-rock — ended five years later, as late summer turned to fall in 1996. This was when I turned 19 and entered my freshman year of college. Here is where my disclaimer starts to put in some work. For starters, when I say “the nineties” I mean “my nineties,” aka the early nineties. It coincides with a profound life transition for me personally that, one could argue (and not very hard), irrevocably colors how I hear the music of the time.

I don’t deny that. I confess it’s particularly true of No Code, the fourth Pearl Jam album released in late August, right as I was moving into my college dorm, a haven for rednecks from rural western Wisconsin who downed entire cases of Natty Ice in one gulp while listening to Pantera’s The Great Southern Trendkill. Pearl Jam is the bookend band of this period — Ten and No Code were released exactly five years apart, with each record coming out on August 27 in their respective years. But in the moment that gap might as well have been 50 years. As I settled into my room and made small talk with my roommate (a very handsome and otherwise nice enough guy who played on the school’s hockey team, my photo negative in every possible way) I quickly realized that my childhood (no picnic, really) was basically over. I felt older than I had ever been — which, technically, was true, I suppose. But I also felt older in the “My Back Pages” sense. I was (spiritually speaking) a burned-out codger then compared to how I am now. Which meant that No Code was perfectly aligned with my own personal frequency. Throughout that semester, whenever the rednecks from rural western Wisconsin got to be too much, I would slip that album into the Discman and brood over Eddie Vedder’s vocal at the close of “Red Mosquito” while traversing the quad. That part of the song where he moans over muscular Abbey Road guitar chords, “If I had known then / what I know now,” over and over, a real moaned koan. Damn straight, Eddie. Oh, how the fresh-faced innocence of a 14-year-old seemed like a pipe dream to my infinitely more grizzled 19-year-old self!

No Code is the definitive album of a made-up genre that I’ve written about elsewhere but never with the comprehensive depth I’m attempting here. I call this genre “Alt-Rock Is Dead” albums, which as the label suggests pertains to records that signify the decline and eventual death of the most culturally predominant form of rock music in the early nineties. While some of these records came out in 1995 and a few more were released in 1997, the majority — and pretty much all the best ones — came out in 1996. (For the sake of narrative cleanliness, I really wish One Hot Minute by the Red Hot Chili Peppers had come out four months later and Pop by U2 had come out four months earlier, so I could write about them here. They certainly belong in 1996 more than their actual respective release years.)

In case there’s any confusion: This is not meant to be necessarily a negative judgement on the artistic quality of these albums. Quite the opposite, really. The best and most illustrative examples of the genre rank with my very favorite albums ever. Even the “Alt-Rock Is Dead” records I don’t love are, at worst, incredibly interesting to me. What interests me, specifically, is how they signaled the decline of this trend/movement/marketing scheme in terms of their commercial performance, and the ways the artists and bands who made them seemed to be willing this response, somehow, as a collective group.

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Thank you for reading Evil Speakers. Look out for my weekly column on Thursday. Also! PLEASE consider pre-ordering my upcoming book “Is This It: The Never-Ending Rise and Fall of The Strokes (and Rock ‘n’ Roll),” due out September 8. Publishers Weekly calls it a “wry, heartbroken homage. . . . an insightful, entertaining meditation on rock ’n' roll might-have-beens.” I’ll take it!

To all my paying subscribers — thank you for making this newsletter viable.

Here are 18 songs I enjoyed from July of 2026. I have written about many of these songs already, and some of them I’ll be writing about in the future. (And some I don’t have current plans to write about, but who knows what the future has in store?) I have made playlists for three different platforms. Enjoy!

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Thank you for reading (and listening to) Evil Speakers. Look out for a playlist of my favorite songs from July 2026 on Tuesday. And my weekly column on Thursday. To all my paying subscribers — thank you for making this newsletter viable.

Welcome to the start of ’90s Neil Month! In August, I’ll be discussing the work of one of our greatest artists, during a period when he surged back to the center of rock music. In the 1990s, Neil wasn’t only acknowledged as a rock legend, he was also making some of the era’s greatest and most acclaimed albums. That starts with 1990’s Ragged Glory, where Neil reconnected with Crazy Horse and his long-time producer David Briggs on a set of songs that revived the long, improvised jams of early albums like Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere. In the process, he created an overture for the grunge movement, pointing the way forward for loud and surly guitars during a decade (or half-decade) when that sound reigned. Neil also made a case (possibly?) for being an even greater guitar player than he is a songwriter.

August 10: Harvest Moon (1992), also touching on MTV Unplugged and Dreamin’ Man Live ’92

August 17: Sleeps With Angels (1994)

August 24: Mirror Ball (1995)

August 31: Broken Arrow (1996), also touching on Dead Man and Year Of The Horse (live album and film)

Catalog Club for September 2026: ???

Hint No. 1: This is one of the greatest English rock groups of all time.

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Thank you for reading Evil Speakers. Look for part one of “Catalog Club: Neil Young (1990-1996)” on Monday, discussing 1990’s “Ragged Glory.” Also, don’t forget to pre-order my book “Is This It: The Never-Ending Rise And Fall Of The Strokes (And Rock ‘‘n’ Roll)” out in just over a month, on Sept. 8.

This column is like an epilogue to that book. It’s about the new Strokes album, “Reality Awaits,” and the reaction to that record, as well as their current tour, the band’s most extensive in years. There are also reviews of new albums by Frank Hurricane, Idle County, and Prairiewolf.

To all my paying subscribers — thank you for making this newsletter viable.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: The Strokes put out a new album and lots of people online were very vocal about not liking it. It’s not what they expected. It was “unfocused.” It was “mid.” But mainly, it wasn’t good like Is This It was good. Or even good like whatever the last Strokes album was. Though that album also was once deemed “mid,” except now the new one seems “mid” in comparison to that one. It’s like they’re not even trying now, really. Just a big ol’ disappointment.

I could be describing the early reactions to the new Strokes record, Reality Awaits. Or I could be summing up the initial responses to every Strokes record save the first one, a span of time that runs a full two decades. All that while, The Strokes have been letting people down. Which isn’t all that unusual for any act commonly associated with an iconic debut. What’s unique about The Strokes is the Groundhog Day nature of it all. For most of their history, they (and by “they” I mostly mean Julian Casablancas) have been a willfully odd art-rock band that relishes undercutting whatever might seem straight-forwardly pleasurable about their music. (Never forget: The Strokes are an early aughts band that is philosophically early nineties.) Overly busy arrangements, treated vocals, murky production, bizarre lyrical tangents, head-scratching song titles — it all has been endemic to Strokes albums since at least First Impressions Of Earth, released way back in 2006. Even before that, it’s not like they were trafficking in easy-to-love pop-rock anthems like their not-so-friendly rivals in The Killers. Step outside your own nostalgia and notice how the guitar and drum sounds on Is This It (to say nothing of the famously distorted vocals) are pared way back compared with the typical major-label rock record of the era. Even when they were young bucks currying media favor, they were always screwing around with something, mostly the public’s expectations.

And yet nobody seems to remember any of this whenever a new Strokes album comes out. Instead, when they do their “odd art-rock band” thing, it somehow registers once more as some kind of shock. For instance: “Millions of people would love some good new Strokes bangers,” Rolling Stone posited in their ambivalent-to-hostile Reality Awaits review, while invoking an apparently recent newspaper headline asking whether The Strokes can “really save rock ‘n’ roll.” (Seriously! In 2026! Someone published this!) “Listening to their seventh record,” the magazine concluded, “one gets the sense that the band itself is only theoretically engaged by that specific proposition.”

You don’t say! I say this with a genuine tinge of alarm: Am I living alone in a dimension where odd art-rock albums like Angles and Comedown Machine exist? If I am, should I assume that Julian’s extremely odd art-rock side project the Voidz also did not breach this separation of realities? (Funny enough, “breaching this separation of realities” sounds like the premise of a Voidz song.)

Now, I know I am not literally living in some bizarro-world timeline from the one where these album reviews reside. But they sure make me feel that way. The Rolling Stone write-up reminds of Pitchfork’s take on 2020’s The New Abnormal, which dinged The Strokes (in another ambivalent-to-hostile review) for being “increasingly uninterested in the tight, classic songcraft that once felt entirely their own.” Of course, as Rolling Stone noted when comparing that album to the allegedly lackluster Reality Awaits, The Strokes in retrospect now seemed to be relatively interested in “tight, classic songcraft” on The New Abnormal after all, particularly in light of “The Adults Are Talking,” a thoroughly Strokesian-sounding hit that ranks with their most famous golden oldies in terms of streaming numbers.

I don’t think there is anything like it in modern music. The amnesia (or is it just lazy thinking?) that greets Strokes albums is stuck somewhere between a constantly boomeranging time warp and a deeply toxic relationship between a highly dysfunctional and emotionally withholding band and a segment of their fanbase (and the media) addicted to perpetual dismay. (You now see where the “never-ending” part of my new book’s title comes from.) What’s truly perverse is how this dismay always attaches to the latest Strokes record, therefore inadvertently improving the reputation of the predecessor in the process. The New Abnormal now seems like a happy medium of experimentation and accessibility after Reality Awaits, just as First Impressions of Earth (which was “not enough like Is This It”) made Room On Fire (which was “too much like Is This It”) sound like a masterpiece, and Angles (where “they didn’t try hard enough”) made First Impressions (where “they tried way too hard”) seem ambitious and fascinating, and Comedown Machine (where “they really didn’t try hard enough”) made Angles (which even haters must concede has some great singles) seem underrated, and so on and so on.

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Thank you for reading Evil Speakers. Every now and then I like to respond to reader questions like this one. Please feel free to reach out with any pithy or thought-provoking questions via the DM’s!

Also: Look for my weekly column on Thursday, which will review the new Strokes album, “Reality Awaits,” and their ongoing tour. Speaking of The Strokes! I have a new book coming out on September 8! It’s called “Is This It: The Never-Ending Rise And Fall Of The Strokes (And Rock ‘n’ Roll).” You can pre-order it here. According to the great Rob Harvilla, “The Strokes might not have ‘saved rock,’ but enough warm and funny and passionate books like this might just save rock criticism.” I accept that responsibility!

To all my paying subscribers — thank you for making this newsletter viable.

This week’s question is inspired by Al B. from Seattle, who said this in a recent subscriber chat: “I’d love to read a discussion of the role of lyrics in music and the enjoyment of music. Obviously a ranking of indie lyricists would be lots of fun and give us lots to argue about.”

I decided to make this conversation a little more interesting by limiting it to lyricists under the age of 40. Because without the age restriction, it’s a little too easy to fall back on the same usual suspects. At least that’s what I found when I ran myself through the paces. In fact, as I was brainstorming names and then Googling their ages, I immediately noticed how many names existed just outside the “under 40” zone, including several high-quality candidates — Ezra Koenig, Lana Del Rey, Andy Shauf, Alex Turner, Ryan Davis — situated in the immediately adjacent “40 to 45” lane.

Writing lyrics actually seems like a skill that ought to improve with age. How many people in their 20s or even 30s really have anything all that worthwhile to share in terms of wisdom or witticisms? Plenty, it turns out. Nevertheless, it does seem a little extra special for a songwriter to have that aspect of their craft on lockdown relatively early on. (There are plenty of songwriters I really like who are merely solid or just serviceable in this department.)

Before we get to my top 10 best lyricists under 40 right now, I wanted to share five common links between my picks. These were things I realized after I came up with my list, which I compiled on instinct without too much deep consideration. I really wanted to go with the writers who have spoken to me in clear, obvious and powerful ways. The ones who came to mind the quickest seemed to do these things the most. And then I noticed that they generally shared the following attributes.

1. Quotability

Probably the single most important attribute: “Can I actually recite lines this person wrote from memory?” If you can write lines that lodge themselves in the mind, you belong here.

2. Sense of humor

You don’t have to be laugh out loud funny, but I find some sense of wit is critical for great lyricists. This can come from wordplay. Or it can be a gift for one-liners. Or it might be an eye for ironic or sardonic observations. Often the humor is deeply melancholic. But some sense of humor means you have a sense of perspective on the world, and that’s what great songwriting is.

3. You paint a picture

Can I see your song as you sing it? Does each verse feel like a scene from a movie? Does it ground me a specific place or time? Those are the kinds of lyrics that stick with me the most.

4. Your songs have a strong auteurist sensibility

Similar to film directors, great songwriters are drawn to common themes that connect their songs as a body of work. It’s the key “what makes you you” element.

5. Your words, at their worst, at least don’t detract from the music

Along with quotability, a vitally important attribute. If I’m not quoting you from this specific song, at least don’t make me hate the music because you’re saying something distractingly stupid on top of it.

Okay, here are my top 10 choices. Let me know your picks in the comments!

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Thank you for reading (and listening to) Catalog Club. Look for my weekly column on Thursday, which will be about the new Strokes album, “Reality Awaits,” and their current tour. To all my paying subscribers — thank you for making this newsletter viable.

This month’s Catalog Club series ends with the culmination of Bradford Cox’s personal, self-described “Shit Era.” Coming off their biggest critical success yet, Deerhunter retreated from popular acceptance with an album Cox later described as being made of “fucking made of sheet metal and sandpaper.” Willfully disjointed and abrasive, Monomania confounded many listeners who loved Halcyon Digest, though it stands now as perhaps the purest manifestation of the band’s “post-southern rock” aesthetic. Drawing on both the earthy rock ‘n’ roll of Bo Diddley and art-damaged re-imaginings of that music by punk groups like The Cramps, Monomania might not quite be “the last rock ‘n’ roll record,” as Cox later called it, but it does signal an end for Deerhunter and indie rock generally.

Also: I am pleased to announce the Catalog Club artist for August 2026!

It’s Neil Young! More specifically: It’s Nineties Neil! In the 1990s, Neil was an icon who was inducted into the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall Of Fame and hailed as a widespread influence on current rockers. But Neil himself was also a current rocker at the time, putting out some of his most enduring music ever, even as he crossed over into his 50s. As a teenager at the time, this period of Neil has long held a special place in my heart, and the albums he put out during the decade remain some of my very favorites. Personally, I can’t think of much music I’d rather listen to during the dog days of summer. So, let’s spook the horse, shall we?

August 3: Ragged Glory (1990), also touching on Arc/Weld and Way Down In The Rust Bucket

August 10: Harvest Moon (1992), also touching on MTV Unplugged and Dreamin’ Man Live ’92

August 17: Sleeps With Angels (1994)

August 24: Mirror Ball (1995)

August 31: Broken Arrow (1996), also touching on Dead Man and Year Of The Horse (live album and film)

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Thank you for reading Evil Speakers. Look for the final part of “Catalog Club: Deerhunter (2007-2013)” on Monday, discussing 2013’s “Monomania.” And don’t forget to preorder my book (due September 8) “Is This It: The Never-Ending Rise and Fall of The Strokes (and Rock ‘n’ Roll)” now. The great Joe Hagan says it’s “not just a cultural history of the Strokes, but a love letter from a fan who bought the ticket, took the ride, and wonders what it all meant ― and what it might still mean ― for a true believer in the promise of rock 'n roll." Sounds like a good book!

Speaking of The Strokes: Promo streams of their new album out Friday, “Reality Awaits,” did not go out to critics until right before my deadline. So I’ll be writing about that album — as well as The Strokes’ current tour, which I saw last Friday — next week.

This column is about Rush’s ongoing reunion tour, which began last month in Los Angeles and continues well into 2027. It also includes a discussion of “nerd music,” a classifier often applied to Rush’s music, and what “nerd music” means in 2026 when so-called “cool music” rarely coincides with “popular music.”

To all my paying subscribers — thank you for making this newsletter viable.

In my upcoming book, there’s an extended riff on what I refer to as the “syllabus” of greatest hits albums that were common entry points for teenagers curious about the history of classic rock when I first starting paying attention to that music, back in the late eighties and early nineties. I laid it out like this:

101 (Junior High School Student/Entry Level)

The Beatles’ “Red” and “Blue” Albums

Hot Rocks 1964– 1971 by the Rolling Stones

Changesonebowie by David Bowie

The Led Zeppelin box set with the crop circles on the cover

Advanced (High School Student/Drug Experimentation Level)

Chronicle by CCR (weed)

Smash Hits by the Jimi Hendrix Experience (more weed)

Legend by Bob Marley (the perfect amount of weed)

Chronicles by Rush (too much weed)

If my book were about Rush and not The Strokes, I would have expounded further on a specific quality of Chronicles in this group of bands and records, which is Rush’s status as the ultimate “older brother” band. Older brothers love Rush, and Rush has many “older brother” qualities — they’re reliable, they’re responsible, they’re eager to please, and they often insist on showing off how smart they are.

My first encounter with the two-disc Chronicles — released in 1990, with the bronze cover in which the band name and album title appear to be engraved, as if passed down from the gods working at the used CD store in the sky — came via my own older brother Paul’s Case Logic 128-disc wallet, which I’m pretty sure contained every album I just listed, and then some. My older step brother Brian also loved Rush, though I don’t remember him repping any specific albums beyond the hits compilation. (It’s possibly he was dropping references to A Farewell To Kings or Hemispheres that I was not savvy enough to pick up on at the time.)

My strongest Rush memories from this period — aside from seeing the video for the thoroughly ridiculous title track from 1991’s Roll The Bones on MTV, an early example of rap-rock that makes Limp Bizkit sound like De La Soul — are actually tied to the older brother of a neighborhood friend, a kid nicknamed (against his will) “Bubba.” Bubba’s older brother was a Rush fanatic straight out of central casting — posters on the wall, prominently displayed compact discs and vinyl that encompassed (I think?) their entire catalog up to that point, and scattered drummer gear that signaled his devotion to The One Himself, the all-knowing philosopher percussionist known as Neil Peart. I was still in the early stages of learning about music myself, and I silently admired this guy’s “rock dude” bedroom set-up, even though my squishy 13-year-old brain couldn’t quite comprehend (1) why the drummer of all people was allowed to write lyrics or (2) the complexity of Rush’s music generally. On Chronicles, I gravitated to the “easiest” songs, like “Working Man” (which sounded like Black Sabbath after reading The Communist Manifesto) and “Fly By Night” (which reminded me of Cheap Trick, except all the guys were less handsome than Bun E. Carlos). But even at that age “Limelight” and “Freewill” seemed a little tired from constant spins on the local classic-rock station, WAPL, which routinely put you through the paces of second-tier bands nobody on Earth seemed to like (REO Speedwagon, Styx) as penance for the stuff you actually waited around to hear (Zeppelin, Sabbath, The Who, Van Halen, the only good Ted Nugent song). Rush fell somewhere in the middle — the B+/A- tier, depending on the track. “Spirit Of The Radio” and “Tom Sawyer” were always welcome. But proggier stuff like “The Trees” was beyond me — this was the early nineties, and the only rock ‘n’ roll arbor life I appreciated was of the “screaming” variety.

All this flashed in my mind as I walked into the United Center in Chicago last Thursday to see Rush’s unlikely return to the stage. I now count myself as a genuine fan, the sort that owns every album and can speak cogently on their various phases and stages, from their definitive prog incarnation in the seventies to the “keyboard years” in eighties to their reboot in the nineties and beyond as grunge-friendly arena-rock elder statesmen. In the larger world, I care about Rush well above the mean. Though I would never call myself a super fan, certainly not in the context of the rabidly insular (and largely male) Rush fan community, which gathered in Chicago like a veritable “older brother” convention, a sea of men with Test For Echo tour shirts tucked in their khakis, a gaggle of obsessives capturing each song on their phones so they could scan the footage later for possible technical errors.

The headline for this tour is that Rush is touring without the late Neil Peart for the first time in 52 years. But it’s easy to forget to that they essentially retired from the road years years before Peart’s tragic death from brain cancer in 2020. Back in 2015, they played 35 shows in North America that weren’t explicitly billed as “farewell” gigs, though by the time the tour wrapped in Los Angeles it was hardly even an “open” secret the band was finished as a live unit. The following year, the finality of this was underlined by a elegiac documentary, Time Stands Still, which plays sort of like a more senior-aged, classic-rock version of Shut Up And Play The Hits, especially now that Rush’s retirement proved as lasting as LCD Soundsystem’s.

The specter of their fallen drummer/lyricist is unavoidable on this current tour,. Video tributes abound throughout both sets, and the performance of Rush’s current drummer — a striking 43-year-old blonde German named Anika Nilles — is judged mostly by how well she replicates his famously intricate parts. (Extremely well, it turns out.) It’s all very respectful. Nevertheless, while it might be uncouth to point this out, it’s also true this tour likely would not be happening if Peart were still around.

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Thank you for reading Evil Speakers. Every now and then I like to respond to reader questions like this one. Please feel free to reach out with any pithy or thought-provoking questions via the DM’s!

And don’t forget to preorder my book (due September 8) “Is This It: The Never-Ending Rise and Fall of The Strokes (and Rock ‘n’ Roll)” now. The great Nick Paumgarten of The New Yorker calls it “an incisive, expansive, genial, playful, and heartfelt consideration of their curious career.” I’ll take it!

To all my paying subscribers — thank you for making this newsletter viable.

Hey Steve, I wanted to get your take on Rick Beato. I saw you make a joke (or maybe it wasn’t a joke) about having a beef with him. Personally, I like watching his videos, and I appreciate how he brings a musician’s perspective to music criticism. What do you think about musicians doing your job? Do you think there’s any merit to the argument that critics ought to know more about the technical details of music? Or at least know how to play an instrument? — Barry from St. Louis

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Thank you for reading (and listening to) Evil Speakers. Look for my regular column on Thursday. To all my paying subscribers — thank you for making this newsletter viable.

In part three of “Catalog Club: Deerhunter (2007-2013)” I talk about the album that signifies Deerhunter’s peak in terms of their prominence in indie rock, where they worked with the co-producer of Gnarls Barkley’s St. Elsewhere and Animal Collective’s Merriweather Post Pavilion and kind of flirted with mainstream acceptance. I also discuss the 2011 Pitchfork Music Festival and my own “halcyon” era as a young-ish music writer at a time when music websites seemed like they might thrive forever and ever. And I wrestle with my own ultimate feelings about this era of “polished” Deerhunter and this period of my life overall. (Also lots of discussion of Atlas Sound’s Parallax and Lotus Plaza’s Spooky Action At A Distance.)

Upcoming schedule for Catalog Club: Deerhunter (2007-2013)

July 27: Monomania (2013)

Catalog Club artist for August 2026: ???

Hint No. 1: This is one of the greatest singer-songwriters of the last 60 years.

Hint No. 2: This series will cover this person’s work in the nineties, though this person isn’t necessarily best known for their music from that decade.

Hint No. 3: One of the albums covered will be a collaboration with possibly the biggest band in the world at the time.

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Thank you for reading Evil Speakers. Look for part three of “Catalog Club: Deerhunter (2007-2013)” on Monday, discussing 2010’s “Halcyon Digest.” Also you can preorder my book (due September 8) “Is This It: The Never-Ending Rise and Fall of The Strokes (and Rock ‘n’ Roll)” now.

This is an essay about the recent albums “Foreign Tongues” by The Rolling Stones and “Frozen Charlotte” by Jack White. Following that are reviews of new albums by Twisted Teens, John R. Miller, and Ultra Lights. To all my paying subscribers — thank you for making this newsletter viable.

The blues, John Lennon famously once said, “is a chair; not a design for a chair but the first chair. The chair is for sitting on, not for looking at or being appreciated. You sit on that music.” In case you’re confused by the metaphor, or curious why the rhythm guitarist for The Beatles regarded Muddy Waters albums like furniture: What he meant is that his band (and every other band of his generation) treated the blues as a blueprint (bluesprint?) for their own music. It was like a public utility. It’s how they learned how to sing, play, perform, write songs, smoke cigarettes in public as a statement of purpose, and so on.

For The Rolling Stones in the sixties, the blues was a chair. They sat on that music. But they did other things with that chair, like throw it into the middle of public spaces sometimes. As the first great band of the English blues revival, they connected with that music as a form of rebellion against the pop industry and mainstream society, in a manner analogous to what the U.K. and NYC punks did about a decade later or what the early rappers accomplished in America around the same time. Blues was the “primitive noise that’s actually a sophisticated change agent” music of that era. If you were young and British and hated contemporary culture at the time the Stones got going — if you found pop silly and vapid and corporate and it just didn’t move you at all — you listened to blues. (Or jazz, if you were a super duper hipster snob.) It was music birthed in the pain of black rural Americans that conveyed (for a non-black, non-rural, and decidedly non-American audience) a tremendous feeling of physical/spiritual/sexual vitality. Blues was real. Though it was also a fantasy, a missive from a world that must have seemed unreal. Most important, it was the antithesis of that silly and vapid and corporate and unfeeling popular music. At least that’s what Brian Jones, the reigning hipster snob who founded the Stones, believed. Though his singer didn’t quite see things that way.

Mick Jagger was always a bit savvier than that. He understood nuances. And the Stones’ music, from the beginning, was nuanced, despite the blustery, bluesy window dressing. Take their cover of “Route 66,” the second track on their first album, titled England’s Newest Hit Makers in the States or simply The Rolling Stones at home. “Route 66” was the one after “Not Fade Away,” their first U.K. Top 10 hit, and their original compromise between performative blues purism and pop concession. (Essentially, they took a bouncy Buddy Holly oldie and aggressively front-loaded the underlying Bo Diddley influence.) “Route 66” originated as “(Get Your Kicks On) Route 66,” an R&B hit from 1946 written by Bob Troup, an actor and jazz pianist inspired by his own journey from his native Pennsylvania to Los Angeles in the early forties, propelled by Hollywood dreams. He eventually connected with the song’s titular highway, the main thoroughfare stretching more than 2,000 miles from the Midwest to the west coast. About a decade before he wrote the song, it was the road that Okies traveled on to California during the Dust Bowl. By the time “Route 66” became popular — first on the “race” charts with a version recorded by Nat King Cole, then on the broader (i.e. white) pop chart via Bing Crosby with the Andrews Sisters — it was how millions of Americans road-tripped to see the Grand Canyon as well as countless contrived tourist traps dotting the heartland.

The Stones learned the song from Chuck Berry’s 1961 album New Jukebox Hits, where it was rocked up though not at the expense of elegant piano licks that echoed Cole’s original take. These British malcontents, however, finally excised the piano and replaced it with what Keith Richards later termed “guitar weaving,” where his playing melded with Jones’ to create a solitary, gritty grind that locked into the zippy, pumped-up groove supplied by Charlie Watts and Bill Wyman. Laid over the top was Mick Jagger, whose supremely confident (even snotty) vocal elided his utter ignorance of the places he was singing about. He had not yet been to Chicago or L.A., much less the song’s roll call of lesser known American cities: St. Louis, Joplin, Oklahoma City, Amarillo, Gallup, Flagstaff, Winona, Kingman, Barstow, or San Bernardino.

Geography was not the point. Escape was. Regardless of whether The Stones were aware of the historical meaning of Route 66 for Americans in the middle of the 20th century, they certainly grasped what it meant now. If the blues was a chair, it was attached to a rocket ship. It could get you places. Places beyond cold and gray England. Especially if you were the Stones. And that rocket ship had seemingly limitless fuel. More than 60 years later, it’s still carrying the Stones down the road.

“Why don't you take me / To where I wanna go? / To Natchez, Mississippi, Sicily, and Rome,” Jagger sings in “Rough and Twisted,” a gnarled harp-heavy blues that kicks off Foreign Tongues, the Stones’ latest album and their 25th studio effort overall (out of umpteen live records, more than anyone has ever bothered to count, surely). That there is no literal road from Natchez (birthplace of Hound Dog Taylor, iconic denizen of Route 66’s starting point in Chicago) to Sicily or Rome is a matter that’s only pertinent to cartographers. For the Stones, it’s a signifier both of how little has changed, and how far they’ve come.

When they began, their relationship with the blues was paradoxical — connecting with this ancient-sounding outsider music was (from a white British perspective) a way to access the counterculture, along with a different and wiser and cooler way of being young. But now, as it has been with The Stones for many years (most of their history at this point), the blues freezes time. You say the Stones are old — well, they’ve always been old, as far as most of us are concerned. The magic of the blues is that whoever plays it sounds the same age. It can conjure gravitas for English kids who are barely out of their teens, or it can manufacture sexual vigor the Cialis set. In this instance, it’s a chair you prop up against the door when those darker angels from the great beyond come knocking.

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